Thank you all for the insights. I particularly like the broad spread of opinions on the subject.
Indeed when I wrote the original post my thoughts were with those young students of non-English speaking countries that start learning to program before they learn English. My case is almost one of those: I started at home when I was 13, toying around with Basic, and at the time not only I didn't know English, but for a few more years I would be learning only French. Later I did start learning English but I still found that while learning programming in Pascal at school its English keywords were somehow an interruption of my mental flow. At the time (20 years ago) localization wasn't a particularly big thing and this issue would have been a bit of a lost cause. But as the world is becoming more and more interconnected I think it is important that we all make an effort to respect cultural needs and sensitivities of both non-western adults and youngsters alike. Ultimately I certainly appreciate the ubiquity of English even though in the interest of fairness and efficiency I'd prefer the role of common language to be given to a constructed language, such as Ido. But it doesn't take a particularly religious person to see that "do to others as you would want them do to you" tends to be a valid principle, and in the same way the world would be at a loss if an Indian university came up with a wonderful programming language available only in Sanskrit, the world is at a loss not having a beautiful language such as Python natively available in other scripts. Again, thank you all! Manu -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
