[veddox]

Some good thoughts there. Although I find this a rather weak point:

> [using your native language] would make your software ... more difficult to spy by the NSA and CIA

At least as far as natural languages are concerned, don't you think NSA & Co. can get translators for anything they care to read? (Heck, they could just fire up Google Translate ;-) )

I think the networking aspect is really important. Plus, you have to remember that programming originated in academia at a time when English had just taken over as the world language of science anyway (apart from Russia, perhaps).

Lastly, don't forget that programming languages aren't just a way of talking to computers, they are an environment in which we do so. Even though there are hundreds of languages out there, just a handful of them account for >90% of all software. As a language becomes popular, people write more libraries, books, and applications for it, which makes it more popular, which means that more libraries, books, and applications get written for it, which makes it more popular...

I don't know exactly how a language gets to this self-reinforcing growth stage, but I bet it has to be some pretty strong incentive. However it happens, you have to get enough programmers using it that they start building up a solid ecosystem. And while that is surely not an insurmountable obstacle, it is nonetheless a pretty big hurdle that any "national language" would have to take - to achieve what?

[informatimago]

Of course nowadays it's easier to get translations. But remember that it is a trick that worked for secret war communications during WWII, not so long ago, when the US used Navajo people to design a code that stayed unbroken, because essentially, nobody in Germany knew the Navajo language.

Then we can assume that the NSA can understand Russian, French or Spanish as well as English. But recently they couldn't understand Arabic and Persian good enough (perhaps this has changed now). What other language is still a deaf spot for them? ;-)

But this is a more general thing than just the idiom. You have to take in consideration the whole culture and "ecosystem". If you develop a body of knowledge in a given language, (from which you derive written theses in this language, and scientific papers in this language, and patents in this language), you have essentially built a conceptual framework that is isolated from the other languages, and until translations or explanations are exchanged, any sentence having a meaning in this framework will be untranslatable, even if you can translate "word-by-word" because the concepts won't transport.

At this point, this is a processus that can only be performed by humans, as you can see from eg. the failures of Google Translate (and don't try to translate Spanish to English or French to English, those are easy translations for Google! Try less frequent language pairs).

[veddox]

Developing a body of knowledge in a given language takes a lot of time, and comes at a huge cost (quasi-isolation from the rest of the world of science).

It's been done before (Germany during the Third Reich, Russia during the Cold War), but even though the scientists involved did some really good work, they couldn't do as much as they could have in cooperation with the rest of the world (a lot of work done abroad was duplicated).

There's a reason science has always been so international - it just makes the research process a lot quicker and more effective. And a common language helps enormously. In the Middle Ages (and for quite some time after) the lingua franca of science was Latin. That changed around the 18th-19th century, when a lot of work started being done in local languages (Mendel wrote his findings up in German, Darwin in English, Pasteur presumably in French, etc.) This meant that to stay on top of your field as a scientist you had to understand all the important languages (English, French, German, some Italian and Russian). After WWII, English became the new Latin so to speak, and we had a predominant language again.

So to sum up, if you are prepared to risk scientific isolation, go ahead and do your own thing in your own language - if a nation state is set on doing something like this, it will manage at an academic level. But in today's globalised world, I doubt whether any commercial/industrial players would be able or even willing to pull it off.