The topic of learning to program as a non-english speaker has come up a few times with friends and coworkers, despite all of us being native english speakers.
I've proposed that languages like Golang and Swift that support unicode should go a step further, and come with a translation file for their keywords, which is then fed into the lexer/parser.
It doesn't solve the problem of an international codebase, or let you switch languages as shown in the Excel example, but it would at least make it significantly easier to learn and write code in one's native tongue.
And it could be available today, without significant changes in tooling on either the compiler vendor's side (except the translation tooling of course) or the developer's side.
Translating the tens of keywords in a given typical language won't get you very far though - you need translations for all the terms in all the commonly used libraries, and documentation of how to use them.
That is true, bare minimum you'd need to translate the stdlib, and at that point you're translating identifiers, which means you might as well go for translating everything as shown in the Excel example.
I've proposed that languages like Golang and Swift that support unicode should go a step further, and come with a translation file for their keywords, which is then fed into the lexer/parser.
It doesn't solve the problem of an international codebase, or let you switch languages as shown in the Excel example, but it would at least make it significantly easier to learn and write code in one's native tongue.
And it could be available today, without significant changes in tooling on either the compiler vendor's side (except the translation tooling of course) or the developer's side.