We have an interesting discussion today in office:
James: It is not about English. It is all about communication. Language as a tool for communication is the key. All programming aims to resolve issues/ problems, we, as a programmer is important to learn how to communicate to ensure all stake holders are in same page. And, there always have more than 1 solution for problem resolution, thus, communication with others on Internet enable you (as programmer) to learn thing quickly (and effectively).
Adrian: learning to programming without decent English reading is possible for programming beginners, but as one progress it would be increasing difficult to advance further for the following reasons:
Lingua Franca of science and technology
Vast majority of educational material, especially the ones on the latest topic and the most advance topic, are predominantly done in English. In particular, interactive resources such as stackoverflow, which could save both beginners and experts countless hours of hair pulling bugs, are all in English.
Programming is not a spectator sport
Reading others' code, writing code, and receiving feedback from one's writing, are the best ways to learn to code; The easiest way to do these are to find an open source project one's passionate in, read and understand how it works, and to contribute bug fixes, new features, and documentation. Problem if you don't read and write English? You guessed it: most of these projects runs in English!
Software inherently has a strong networking effect -- and if you don't speak the lingua franca, you will be missing out most of the benefit of these effects!
KW Chan:
Charlie: I think that to a large extent, understanding a basic level of english is crucial to learning how to program. By basic level, it could be defined as being able to make simple communication using english but has a narrow vocabulary. This is because: firstly, most coding resources are written and explained in english, so in order to learn how to program, understanding english would be a critical part. But in the slim chance where programming resources are translated into another language, there’s a risk that the translation is not the most accurate. Secondly, english is the most widespread language amongst coding languages. All syntaxes and functions in most coding languages are in english, especially the most used languages like python, java, html or c++. Meaning, in order to understand and to write your code, some degree of english must be used. Plus, when writing statements and figuring out the logic for the code, programmers must understand the meanings of “if” or “else,” as without the understanding of these basic vocabulary, the logic of the code would not be clear for the programmer. Essentially, to learn programming, some english must be learnt in order to both understand the resources for coding and to understand the logic and syntax of the code.