| Well much of the 20th century computing research was done in the UK and the US. Since the 1930's English has replaced German as the common language for exact science if you were studying engineering upto the end of the 1920's you would pretty much have had to learn German at the time to be able to read textbooks and cutting edge papers. And while we might get natural language programming (even tho I think that the recent advancement in visual assisted programming kinda makes that irrelevant) English would most likely still remain the standard at least as far as the actual ASCII alphabet. When BASIC (and the likes) was popular there were quite a few localized versions of it including Russian, Chinese (which mostly simply mapped simplified Chinese to it's English counterparts on the keyboard which created a language that made very little sense) as well many European languages (German, Italian, French).
But considering that for the most part programming languages are now consolidated there is very little chance that localized languages would become popular, sure you can localize pretty much any language since you only need to modify the compiler/interpreter but it just doesn't makes sense. English as being one of the most simplest languages (fairly simple grammatical rule set, low word count etc.) as well as the fact that for better or worse pretty much every term in computer science originated in English just means we'll have to stick to it. And while China does like localizing most things considering they've added English to their national curriculum now you'll have more English speakers in China within a decade than the rest of the world combined.
India already has the 2nd most English speakers in the world and is expected to pass the US within the next decade to become the country with most English speakers. |