Basically everyone who hasnt reached retirememt age has learned pinyin which is a phonetic transcription using latin characters. For the english language used in programming the difficulty should be the same as lets say an Italien student would face.
English is almost universally spoken among western college graduates, and it is the same character set. But I can’t imagine the difficulty of learning programming compounded by it being in a language you barely understand with a character set you are unfamiliar with. Did Chinese language based programming languages appear? Or is everyone eating the bullet (or perhaps I am overstating the difficulty, hard to get an idea of how much english the average chinese college graduate is exposed to).