>If you don't speak English quite well at an early age (already at 10-13 years old) you are much less likely to get into software development at an early age.
china and russia beg to differ?
china and russia beg to differ?
I could read advanced academic papers written in English (not just technical, also philosophy and economics) well before my speaking fluency was good enough to make "live conversation" well.
Of course, there is a horrible side to it: coming from Eastern Europe and living in Western Europe, I need to "dumb down" my English a lot, and to force myself to talk slower in English when speaking with French/Italian/Spanish (French are the worse btw - never met people harder to communicate efficiently with than them... even when their language skills are ok they sprinkle that "context dependency" and "nonobviousness" into everything) people that speak "English" but are actually only fluent in a lifeless subset of "standard international business English"...
Contrast with, say, an African child of well-to-do parents who has access to computers and the Internet but who doesn't (yet?) speak English. Good luck finding lots of coding resources.
Formerly it may have mattered if you can afford a computer. But prices have come down so far that this is not an issue anymore. Hey, you could use a Raspberry with a keyboard and attach it to a TV to learn how to program.
Depends what you're looking for. E.g. for many libraries/APIs there is documentation in English and no other language.