How do non-English speaking people write code, when the syntax is in English?

I started coding in Basic back when I was in 5th grade.  I started learning English from the 3rd grade.  By the time I went to college, my English was pretty decent. Yet it was only when I started playing with Pascal for my CS studies, my brain made the connection that all those commands I type are actually English words.  Until then I used them as abstract terms, much like in math. Learning COBOL reinforced that connection significantly. That realization made reading code much easier - almost as reading it out loud and getting the story right.  But it temporarily made writing the code much harder.  As now I was getting the order of things wrong, because they would work in English but wouldn't in the programming language. Until I discovered Perl, which has more flexibility for things "print $foo if $blah".  Then I just started hating all programming languages that weren't designed by a linguist. :)

Learning programming expects learning the programming language (therefore the commands/syntax) .. i.e. javascript `var test = 1`; (learning the language teaches what `var` means). You can still write code in your own language; though the commands/syntax are limited to the programming-language used; you can still name classes/methods/functions/etc in your native language (though this is not the norm).The other point. I assume the main point; errors in english; comes down to documentation; documentation should explain (doc should be available in most languages). a good error has a universal code and a localized message. via the code you should be able to find (google) everything about the error.

They learn English

I'm a non native english speaker (well english is not my mother tongue) I learned english from programming, not vice versa. 99.99% of decent programmers speak (at least write!) and understand english.

Well, I am a Software Enginer from China. We have to learn English since In middle School. You Know In China People think that English is a basic Skill for a programmer. And most of us,search using Google, quey Answer in StackOverflow,Share Code or find open source code from Github. In Conclusion, We learn English before We Programing.

We just learn enough English to be able to code. For example: hashing. It means you reduce a complex class to a 4-byte integer, and it has some properties that are quite difficult to explain in a short english post (non-invertible, uniform,...) But I have no idea what hashing means in Dutch, my mother tongue.

I imagine a large percentage of developers actually know English to some degree, but anything can be learned if you want to. Just consider all the symbols we learn and use every day. Symbols that are often outdated (a floppy disk for Save?) or ambiguous outside a specific context (a church bell for notifications?).When you look at it from a distance it's kind of interesting that all programming languages (at least those I know of) are in English. Why not Chinese, Japanese etc?It's also interesting that somehow 7-bit ASCII, that pretty much only covers English-speaking languages, is still so dominating: E-mail addresses, URLs etc. Sure, there are in cases escapes for using other encodings, but it's rather bottom-up than top-down.

Because English is understood by educated people of most countries. In Spain for example, we learn English in primary school. Thus, you could live here and communicate only in English (as some of my colleagues do).

The thing here is.... The Syntax is not English, that's the beauty of code. You can write it in any language you articulate or understand best.For example, can you tell me how this would be English?<?PHP f00 = 12;foo2 = 12;foo3 = foo*foo2;?>Foo is not an English word, it can be anything, php is the Syntax, numbers are a universal language.