[browsergap]

Only ~5% of Earth speaks English natively. Another 15% speak it as an nth language.

I think English based programming is an anomaly that came out of the post-WWII US/UK cultural world order, and from that sustained economic boom came modern computers, languages and the internet to a mass market.

20% of the world speaks Mandarin Chinese (not all as a first language tho). And, about the same % as speak English natively, speak Hindi (+ dialects) natively, and again about the same amount speak Arabic, and again about the same amount (all above 300 million) speak French, tho a greater % of those have le français as an nth language.

HN, and programming, shouldn't get carried away with the myopic, "fish in the fishbowel" view of English primacy. It's really not. Not globally. Just like "white people" are not a majority. Only in a very narrow, very opinionated and specific corner of the globe are those things true. It's a big world out there, much bigger, it seems than many of you imagine from your keyboards.

Even tho HN is in English, many HNers are not native English speakers. I see people associating programming languages with English and thinking it's simply natural (if just by convention), but for most of the world, this simply isn't true, and it could have been another way. In the future it might be another way.

So I really feel it's not accurate to say there's some "problem" with people on Earth creating languages that are founded in Chinese, or Japanese, or Italian, or Russian, or Hindi, or any of the many other languages people speak. For a large corner (or even a small corner) of the world, it would not be a "problem", it would be perfectly natural.

I just don't think it's that accurate, or that useful, to think of programming and English as being somehow a natural match.

When people speak about "representation" in the "tech industry" they ought to consider this factor as well. I'm not just talking about SV, I mean "global representation in engineering". Of course, if Japanese people decide to embrace a language that somehow uses Japanese letters or characters then, there's probably not much you can do about it.

I'm just saying, don't assume it's a bad thing and don't think somehow English and programming has to go together. Certainly at the level of logic, and CS, programming is completely independent of English (tho interesting to think about how the grammar of English maybe constrained and drove initial language structures, concepts and flow control and do a comparative study of differences to languages that emerged from cultures and used other human languages.)

[EdiX]

> 20% of the world speaks Mandarin Chinese (not all as a first language tho). And, about the same % as speak English natively, speak Hindi (+ dialects) natively, and again about the same amount speak Arabic, and again about the same amount (all above 300 million) speak French, tho a greater % of those have le français as an nth language.

What are your sources for this because cross checking with wikipedia, which uses Ethnologue as a source, I find several discrepancies. For example the number of people who speak french isn't "the same amount" as native english speakers, it's 53% and that's if you include 2nd language speakers. You make it sound like Hindi and English are comparable but Hindi has very few 2nd language speakers.

In fact looking at [1] the choice of english looks a lot more logical than I would have thought.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_total_num...

[browsergap]

Really? You're gonna fight over some discrepancies in sources, as if that changes things.

The main point is that there are huge numbers of people who speak these languages and there's nothing special about programming and English beside history.

I disagree with your conclusion from your [1]. Any of those groups could create code based on their own languages. There's nothing at all logical about English.

For my sources, just type "X speakers" or "X speakers in the world" into google and the infobox results is what I use.

Your wikipedia source is way outta date. 1.12 Bn Chinese speakers? Come on. China's population is ~ 1.5 Bn now (was 1.4 in 2018).

French is 270 million. Sorry I said above 300m, but it's within 100% of the number that speak English natively, is what I was saying.

[TulliusCicero]

Programming and English a natural match, no. Programming and a global language, or the global language as a natural match, maybe.

There's nothing super special within English itself that makes it particularly well suited for programming, but the fact that it's the global language of business, tourism, air travel, diplomacy, etc. makes a good case for it. English has far, far more non-native speakers than any other language.

[seek3r]

Taking aside the difficulty of learning the language, which language would be a good replacement?

I don’t mean it to be provocative, I’m genuinely curious.

[TulliusCicero]

You're asking the wrong person. I don't know that much about languages, and from what I do know, there isn't really an obviously better language, other than maybe a constructed one like Esperanto (but then you get into the whole thing where it's hard to go off a language with so few native speakers).

[browsergap]

That's not actually true tho.

Chinese Mandarin has ~ the same number of speakers as all English speakers, it's just your Englo-centric bias that makes you see the world in your skewed way, where English is the center of everything, which is exactly what I'm railing against (in English no less)!

It does have international currency, but that's blurrier than you might think. French and Arabic both have enormous regional currency in EMEA. It's not the only candidate. Spanish in South America. There's plenty of places where English is few and far between (try Japan).

But the point is, even if you can say it's global (which it's not if you're taking a truly global perspective and thinking you can "go anywhere and speak English and you'll be operating fine!"), so what? There's huge populations of people who are not speaking English and they're just as good programmers, so why not have programming languages arising from their language? It's a possibility.

It's a historical accident that English with coding, that's all.

[devit]

Written English is by far the best language among the globally popular ones and the European languages because it's easier to learn due to its small alphabet with no special ligature rules, small frequently used vocabulary, and low number of word variants.

Spoken English is not so good due to complex and unintuitive pronunciation, but that's not very relevant nowadays where most media is text (and also, it would be easier to popularize a new pronunciation for English, e.g. pronouncing it as if it were Latin, than a whole new language).

[drran]

Characters are not a problem at all. They can be learned in a week or two. For me, Spanish is much easier to learn - I can read it without a problem, even if I don't know Spanish at all. I can take text of an unknown song in Spanish and then start to sing it immediately. In contrast, I struggle to pronounce English words even today, after 32 years of learning English as programmer. English poetry can damage my brain.

[browsergap]

I think that's good logic about suitability, but it shouldn't mean it's universally the only language that programming languages use. By the same logic, I think an argument could be made for Japanese. Or Korean!