The most likely German candidate would be 'sonst', which would be both in common use and short enough for a programming language keyword. E.g. the most likely option for 'if-then-else' is 'wenn-dann-sonst', assuming that German-origin theory is right of course.
One thing that's mostly forgotten today is that German had a very rich 'corpus' of wonderful nerdy computer science words up until the 1990s which unfortunately has fallen out of fashion. Nowadays it's a pretty terrible 'pidgin dialect' when Germans talk about programming and computers to each other (to a point where it's much less awkward to just speak English in the first place lol).
One thing that's mostly forgotten today is that German had a very rich 'corpus' of wonderful nerdy computer science words up until the 1990s which unfortunately has fallen out of fashion. Nowadays it's a pretty terrible 'pidgin dialect' when Germans talk about programming and computers to each other (to a point where it's much less awkward to just speak English in the first place lol).