The University of Antioquia in Colombia teaches its introductory programming courses in Lexico, a Spanish-based, object-oriented .NET language. The intent is to teach programming concepts in the students' native language before introducing English-based mainstream languages.There are many other Non-English-based programming languages and there is even a related question in Stack Overflow. I have several questions regarding these languages:Has anyone on this site learned to program using a non-English-based language? If so, how difficult was the transition to the first English-based language?Is there any research-based evidence that non-English speakers learn programming faster/better using languages with keywords in their native language instead of English-based languages?
Non-English-based programming languages
programming languages;learning;spoken languages
Consider the number of keywords in a typical programming language; usually it's below 100, often closer to 40. Now compare this to any other formalism, e.g. math symbols, or musical notation. There's at least comparable number of (cryptic) symbols to learn. But learning them buys you a common language with the whole world that uses math or musical notation. But a programming language is not limited to keywords. Standard libraries use descriptive names, lots of them, and there's no hope these names can be localized. If you're seriously into programming, you need a bit of English. And if you're into medicine, you need a bit of Latin, etc  nobody complains; having a common terminology that needs no translation helps enormously. A few languages in the past tried to support localization of keywords; the fact that they don't easily come to mind may illustrate how successful these attempts were.So the only reasonable audience that non-English-based programming languages may have is non-programmers that don't want to be programmers, and write tiny code snippets. Here you have localized names of Excel functions. Here you may have simplistic languages for kids; such languages can have no words at all, as in Scratch.