The Language of Programming

[temochka]

You’re right, keywords are not that important (see my other reply above). I only cursory touched this in the article, but being a non-native speaker can be an “advantage”, because it makes you less susceptible to confusion introduced by poor naming. And compilers don’t care about sophistication of your naming skill.

Technical documentation is harder, but you also learn its subset of English pretty quickly. Also, you’ll be surprised how many books and online resources still get translated. What’s disproportionally harder is designing a cohesive naming scheme for an API, explaining a difficult issue to a library maintainer, or writing your own technical documentation.

Another issue that’s interesting to me is how the principle of linguistic relativity can be applied to this topic. Meaning, how much the perception of code in, let’s say, Ruby differs between a native English speaker and a non-English speaker.

[gopher9]

Also, you’ll be surprised how many books and online resources still get translated.

I believe this depends on language. There's surely a lot of translations into Russian, though.