skavenhorde
Little BRO Rat
It's the Chinese I'm worried about, hopefully Hong Kong's influence on their culture can help English grow in the Far East. For better or worse, England's 19th century imperialism and the US' post WWII territory & army bases around the world have helped push us towards a single language.
I wouldn't worry too much about Chinese taking over as the dominant language. Most parents in Taiwan (and China) have their children learn two or even three different languages. They start them off in Kindergarten learning English on top of Mandarin. They even have to pass an English test to get into senior high school. If they fail they have to retake it before they're allowed to go to high school. Seems a bit harsh to me, but there it is.
Chinese isn't just one language, it's hundreds, that's the problem.. The difference between regions can be as big as two different languages, so i think english makes more sense in a programming language.
That is somewhat true, but still a lot of people in China speak Mandarin and it's not like any of the regional languages will ever become dominant. Either people in China will learn both Mandarin and their own language or their regional language will be phased out completely (over many many years of course) As you can see here most of China speaks Mandarin. It's the most widely used language in the world with over 1 billion native and second language speakers. Over here in Taiwan Taiwanese isn't taught in schools. They either pick it up at home or from friends at an early age. I recently read this article about why Taiwan as a society has chosen to teach a language other than it's own. It's a good article for anyone interested in languages.
Now programming in Chinese would be a pain. To type just on character you have to type out a combination of other characters that are on the keyboard and then choose the character you want from a list that pops in a window. I only know this because I've seen my girlfriend type and I'm amazed at how easily she does it. This keyboard is literally filled with 3 different characters on every single letter, number and punctuation. I asked her once how she knows what to type and she goes by the phonetic spelling of the word. She also said she prefers to type in English because it's a lot easier to use English than Chinese.
Personally, I wouldn't mind seeing something like Firefly's setting with both English and Chinese as the dominant language. It was funny as hell to hear the characters swearing in Chinese. I was surprised when I heard one of them start saying something in Chinese. I know enough Chinese (especially what they were saying ) to pick up on the meaning and I literally almost fell off my chair when I couldn't stop laughing.