[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.