Here in Russia there've been many attempts to create a Russian-based programming language.

The only success story is the scripting language of 1C, the accounting software which is the de facto standard in organizations. It's very popular and there's many job offers for it. The use of Russian language is justified because it would be a pain to try translate all the legal and accounting-oriented terminology specific to Russia into English. Constantly switching between English keywords and Russian variable/class names would also be difficult.

If anyone here learned to program before learning english (I assume if you're posting here, you understand english now), I'd be really interested to hear about your experiences! I've often wondered about how much more difficult it must be!

It wasn't that difficult, you kind of learn English along the way. However, since you do not listen/talk, you don't know how words are actually pronounced. So you just guess, and it's often wrong. Like I once thought "value" is pronounced "vuhloo" (stress on 2nd syllable).

Sadly there's still many engineers in the country (including seniors) who never bothered learning English properly, so they mispronounce everything all the time. They know what all the words mean, but they don't know how they're pronounced, or how to use them in a sentence.

You can ask any non-native English speaker. And then someone who grow up speaking English. The answers would be un-shockingly the same - programming languages [relatively] aren't that hard. English - is fucking insoluble.

Beginner programmers tend to focus on programming languages. Programming is for humans. Focus on the human language!

Well, I just think for me, it would have been a lot harder to get started if key words like ‘if’, ‘while’, ‘int’ etc were arbitrary gobbledygook instead of terms I already knew. I guess that’s wrong?

Always interesting when this pops up. Spent a pleasant weekend realizing I could understand enough Japanese to read through Nadeshiko documentation and write a few simple programs.