Do you have to know English to be a Programmer?

I have met many Japanese programmers who could not speak English but could read enough to figure out APIs from English documentation.

They were really great at debugging and figuring out difficult code that was originally written in the US as they did not get confused by broken comments and mislabeled variables. i.e. "cnt" didn't strike them as meaning "count" they looked at how it was currently used by the program without supposing that originally it was meant to hold a "count" of something.

One of the unique arcane things about AppleScript is that they attempted to have multiple concrete syntaxes for source code -- not just vocabulary but also word-order/grammar. The source code is stored in a AST format with the dictionaries (libraries) pre-linked. They only ever made English and Japanese syntaxes.