This is something that has been a long time coming.
It all started with ASCII and EBCDIC being the dominant data storage standards, if your characters were not a subset of, or representable in those sets then you were plain out of luck.
Microsoft deserves a good bit of credit here, they worked hard to get their software translated in many languages.
Unicode/Utf8 support in most internet standards now gives parity to the rest of the world on that front, it is only logical that programming languages will follow.
I've seen a listing of a basic program that was written - for fun - with dutch keywords, and one thing that I noticed was that I completely think in English when programming, all my identifiers are in English etc. Also, all the documentation (of my code and most other stuff out there) is in English and so is most of the published research.
It will be a long time still before there is equal representation on that front and we will be facing yet another hurdle in comprehending other peoples code.
Maybe that standardization of programming languages on English is not such a bad thing, even if it isn't 'fair' in the strict sense of the word (because it gives an advantage to all those who have English as their native language), but it does create a very large middle ground.
Think of English as the new Latin, it allows you to communicate with the people active in your field the world over.
It all started with ASCII and EBCDIC being the dominant data storage standards, if your characters were not a subset of, or representable in those sets then you were plain out of luck.
Microsoft deserves a good bit of credit here, they worked hard to get their software translated in many languages.
Unicode/Utf8 support in most internet standards now gives parity to the rest of the world on that front, it is only logical that programming languages will follow.
I've seen a listing of a basic program that was written - for fun - with dutch keywords, and one thing that I noticed was that I completely think in English when programming, all my identifiers are in English etc. Also, all the documentation (of my code and most other stuff out there) is in English and so is most of the published research.
It will be a long time still before there is equal representation on that front and we will be facing yet another hurdle in comprehending other peoples code.
Maybe that standardization of programming languages on English is not such a bad thing, even if it isn't 'fair' in the strict sense of the word (because it gives an advantage to all those who have English as their native language), but it does create a very large middle ground.
Think of English as the new Latin, it allows you to communicate with the people active in your field the world over.