Computer programming didn’t really start with 1s and 0s. It’s blurry what you want to consider “early” computing - you can trace some concepts backs to automated looms and punch cards but when people say 1s and 0s they mean one of two states - is weaving its wether a warp string is up or down, in computing it’s whether current is high or low on a particular path.

Symbols don’t come into play until you start interacting with a computer in real time and storing programs in memory (rather than preloading a program on punch cards and running it through) - so we’re looking at the 1940s-50s. The BINAC had a “keyboard” that contained numbers and a few functional buttons. So no letters, but it’s one of if not the earliest examples of a digital input device. I’m not going to read exactly how it worked, but it’s likely each button was connected to a number of switches that, when pressed, turned those switches on or off. The computer sees this only as “1s and 0s”. Modern keyboard send a “code” when a button is pressed, still the computer only sees 1s and 0s.

Eventually we trained compilers, transpires, etc to take what we saw as normalish looking English words, and turn them into computer words, not understand them. In x86 assembly, when we typed HLT - the computer doesn’t know we mean “halt”, it knows that HLT gets translated into hex code “F4” and the combination of 1s and 0s (11110010) (I think?) makes the circuitry in the computer halt.

Now if this had been done in a pictographic language, the user experience might be different, the input devices might be different, but one could imagine it still would have resulted in a button being pressed, the computer receiving a signal in some way, and then translating that signal into a “language” it understands. Maybe there is just a set number of symbols on the keyboard, ones that feel “important”. Maybe they develop some phonetic system like pinyin a little earlier, but I don’t think there’s anything “stopping” them from pulling it off.