> I hate to say this, but: Think of the children!

> Seriously. American kids can start to learn to program at age 6. Non-English-speaking kids can do so once they're old enough to know English.

I don't think that follows at all. Non-English-speaking kids can also start to learn programming at any arbitrary age. What they need to learn for that is a programming language, not English.

Sure, most programming languages are subsets of English -- but extremely limited subsets. And the meanings of the words in them are (often radically) different from the original meaning of the same word in English; I suspect English-speaking learners have only a tiny initial advantage of the words being similar, but in effect have to learn them as if they were from a foreign language anyway.