[romanhn]

I was programming BASIC and Pascal as a non-English-speaking kid and the Latin-based syntax was not a problem at all. I think you underestimate how far sheer drive can get you. That said, I do agree that basic understanding of English is more or less a requirement these days if you want to stay up to date on modern developments. If not, well, many languages have enough translated materials to get by.

[jayathra]

That’s amazing! I have visited certain parts of the world where the access to resources are minimal in terms of learning English. I don't know the specifics of your story/background but especially when the native language doesn't involve the Latin alphabet at all, the learning curve is steeper. A fluent English speaker can begin coding immediately, while a non-English speaker has to learn two languages at once.

Even if basic materials exist in other languages, most advanced documentation, debugging tools, and libraries remain in English. Do you think that creates a significant disadvantage for non-English speakers?

[romanhn]

Well, in my experience lack of English was more of a small bump rather than having to learn a whole new language. The number of keywords used was fairly limited (if, for, while, begin, end, goto, etc) and not that difficult to memorize. I certainly didn't come out of it with some newfound understanding of English language. It did help that English (and Latin alphabet) is so pervasive in the society that words are easy to sound out even without knowing the particulars. If programming in Hindi or Mandarin was the standard, a lot of us would be out of luck :)

I do agree with your last point - majority of documentation is indeed in English. I learned programming before Internet, with little access to books (they existed, but were hard to find), and mostly relied on translated help files. Growing up these days, I'd definitely be soaking up English to be able to navigate all the available information - feels like a fair trade-off! I do think it's convenient that there's a lingua franca, so to speak, in software dev - there's enough variation in programming languages that it's nice not to have to deal with additional fracturing along spoken language lines.