[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.