[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.