Not at all naive. In fact, the language barrier plays a huge part in why Japan's software abilities have lagged behind.
Programming in itself is relatively easy to abstract from English, as math is a universal language. If you write it enough times, "print" and other commands are just concepts.
Where the language barrier rears its head is in documentation. All those countless hours we save with Stack Overflow is something a Japanese developer frankly can't leverage. Even basic documentation is lacking. Python and many other languages don't have a Japanese version of it's documentation. Ruby is the best supported language there.