Only ~5% of Earth speaks English natively. Another 15% speak it as an
nth language.
I think English based programming is an anomaly that came out of the post-WWII US/UK cultural world order, and from that sustained economic boom came modern computers, languages and the internet to a mass market.
20% of the world speaks Mandarin Chinese (not all as a first language tho). And, about the same % as speak English natively, speak Hindi (+ dialects) natively, and again about the same amount speak Arabic, and again about the same amount (all above 300 million) speak French, tho a greater % of those have le français as an nth language.
HN, and programming, shouldn't get carried away with the myopic, "fish in the fishbowel" view of English primacy. It's really not. Not globally. Just like "white people" are not a majority. Only in a very narrow, very opinionated and specific corner of the globe are those things true. It's a big world out there, much bigger, it seems than many of you imagine from your keyboards.
Even tho HN is in English, many HNers are not native English speakers. I see people associating programming languages with English and thinking it's simply natural (if just by convention), but for most of the world, this simply isn't true, and it could have been another way. In the future it might be another way.
So I really feel it's not accurate to say there's some "problem" with people on Earth creating languages that are founded in Chinese, or Japanese, or Italian, or Russian, or Hindi, or any of the many other languages people speak. For a large corner (or even a small corner) of the world, it would not be a "problem", it would be perfectly natural.
I just don't think it's that accurate, or that useful, to think of programming and English as being somehow a natural match.
When people speak about "representation" in the "tech industry" they ought to consider this factor as well. I'm not just talking about SV, I mean "global representation in engineering". Of course, if Japanese people decide to embrace a language that somehow uses Japanese letters or characters then, there's probably not much you can do about it.
I'm just saying, don't assume it's a bad thing and don't think somehow English and programming has to go together. Certainly at the level of logic, and CS, programming is completely independent of English (tho interesting to think about how the grammar of English maybe constrained and drove initial language structures, concepts and flow control and do a comparative study of differences to languages that emerged from cultures and used other human languages.)