I'm an english native speaker, so on the one hand, I'm glad english is so common in programing. On the other, I can't help but wonder, aren't other languages actually better for the job at hand? Chinese, Japanese kanji, or to a lesser extent, Hangul, all have this kind of awesome mix of concision and expressiveness. I'm not really a language guy, but I've been tempted to learn chinese just for this reason. It also has a really cool feature of being much easier to read than to write - which makes a certain level of 'reader-first' coding practice built into the language itself. You could cut down on the number of sigils, line noise, even play around with different ways to organize source code (there are, for instance, palindrome poems written in chinese that use two dimensions, which would be basically impossible in english).
