I think that’s because it (¿almost?) always splits “is not” in two parts. Compare “If x is not y” with “if not (x is y)”.
> for some reason, "when" in ansible is also very weird
When feels weird to me, too. I think that is because “when” often implies something will happen, but you don’t know the exact time, while “if” means you don’t know whether it will happen at all (compare “when it rains” with “if it rains”). So, using when to describe a trigger is fine, but to me it doesn’t make sense as a statement in an imperative programming language.
> just reading the README felt very weird.
I had to check, and yes, there is a README.md, and no LIVREMOI.md.
[edit] n/m based on correction below and followup search, there are far more LISEZMOI.md files than LISMOI.md files.
I guess you will not like Lisp then (;
Didn't someone say something about using French to speak of love and german to speak of science? Maybe english is getting it's use.
That's interesting - as someone noted below, in musical notation, the keywords are nearly all Italian, and it would feel quite weird if they were written in English instead. So in that sense, yeah, maybe `for`, `if`, `then`, `import`, etc. are the "fortissimo" and "d.s. al coda"s of the programming world.
This can actually be useful for locally-defined variables. Even more so if you're using an editor with LSP support where it's trivial to bring up the doc comments for an identifier as a tooltip - with some added support, you could even write these doc comments in multiple natural languages, while keeping the code itself quite linguistically neutral.
Possibly a quote attributed to Charles V: I speak in Latin to God, Italian to Women, French to Men, and German to my Horse.