Arun, do you know what life is like for non-native English speakers around most of the world? Most countries are not India and China with population large enough to create its own eco-system for programming languages which are not English based.

How well do you think it would go for Lithuanians or Icelanders to create programming languages in their native language?

There is a reason we learn English is small countries from first grade. There is no way we could recreate even a fraction of knowledge that exists in English.

It seems like a very strange choice to me, if a school system focuses on teaching children programming but not English. English opens the doors to the world in a far more profound way than programming.

It is the reason why one studies languages like Greek and Latin as they give access to a large body of old knowledge. English is the new Latin. Just like Latin in the past gave a way for intellectuals with different native languages to communicate and exchange knowledge, English serves the same purpose today. It is THE language of the international programming community.

If programming was reduced a world defined by the boundaries of my native language, then I would have lived in a very impovirished world of programming.

I think native languages can have a purpose for things like Scratch and simply toy langues to teach the principles of programming. However any serious programming work should be done in English. If you don't write in English you cannot share code with the rest of the world.

Writing code is such a specialized dispiline that we need the ability to communicate and exchange ideas across borders.

Chinese and Hindu may be spoken by a large number of people but these are not international languages. Very few people speak any of those langauges as a second language.

I think the only realistic alternative to English as a programming language would be Spanish and French. They are the only other languages with a sensible number of people who speak it as a second language.