You simply can’t be effective in programming without knowing English. Having few words translated in your language wouldn’t help much. Moreover it is much easier to learn English than learning how to code.
Human languages are intuitive, share some aspects and we have centuries of knowledge on how to learn them. Programming is still a relatively new activity in comparison and requires a set of knowledge that you don’t already get in your youth like speaking does. I also know basic Greek and I can swear it was easier to learn than coding at a professional level.
You can't compare basic Greek to professional coding, learning Greek well enough to make a living from it (translation/writing/etc) is what you should compare to. Learning basic Greek is definitely harder than basic coding, and a language's difficulty also depends on where you're coming from (Portuguese is going to be much easier for Spaniards than for Greeks).
Stavros, you said it yourself. It depends on the language you already speak. Learning a programming language doesn’t have any starting point whereas a human language has. Regardless of how different the languages, you can still find similarities in sounds, phrase constructions, etc. Learning to code doesn’t have this
Learning how to code is trivial next to the years it takes to learn a natural language. Tiny unambiguous vocabulary and syntax. Objectively, a programming language is a much smaller thing to learn that's simple by design.
If you polled people who learning programming and a second language in adulthood, I'd wager the vast majority of them would say learning the natural language was harder.
Of course "learning to program" is extremely imprecise. Learning enough of a language to use its control flow constructs is a much different bar than learning enough to write an Emacs plugin or whatever you might have in mind here.
Based on what do you say this? I have my browser set to non-geographically specific, and when I ask programming questions to it, there are many, many answers in chinese and japanese. If the programming languages statements themselves were in those languages, a chinese or japanese speaker (in my field) would not need english at all.
From my experience the amount and the quality of resources available in English is simply not comparable with any other language. Surely it is possible without but much harder. I am Italian, during my studies I had the chance to read technical books both translated and in original language. The translation is usually very poor. On a daily basis work scenario, no Italian online resource would come close to stackoverflow to help diagnose issues quickly. Moreover, it takes time for official documentations to be translated in other languages. Even years in some times. It really depends on your sector. If you work in a niche area where you don’t necessarily need to be up to date with the industry you could survive without English.
