There are programs. Then, there are programs that help you make programs. Then, using those programs, you can create a program that will help other people create programs. I was reading about the pioneer plaque and, really, it’s amazing. So, on Pioneer 11 and 12, there are plaques with information about our human race in case aliens ever find the spacecraft. Assuming the aliens have some sort of mechanism to read and process electromagnetic light, they could gather information about our location and our intelligence, just by understanding the supposedly universal symbols on the plaque. But that’s the problem. How could anything be universal? Alien’s don’t know what an arrow is or what it means. They wouldn’t know who Pythagoras was but they’d know his theorem. They would probably use a different number system with different symbols and base. But not even aliens, what about just foreigners? Meaning like a Spanish guy living in Europe. Programming is definitely not universal. First off, programs are (mostly) written in ASCII, which is limited to Latin-based languages. Then, program interpreters are designed to read English. So what about an Arabic programmer? He doesn’t even know the alphabet, much less what programming words in English mean. So what will programming be like in the future? Let’s assume that the world doesn’t all learn Esperanto. Most likely, programming will stay in English. I just can’t see people typing code in Chinese: it’s just too slow. To prove this, even Spanish websites are written with their functions and variables in English. What about Iron Man? Apparently, you can engineer stuff just by moving your hands around and talking to your computer. Really, movies have to make programming look funner than it really is. But what about aliens? Maybe they’ve got like electrodes that you stick into your brain and you just visualize programming control structure and it comes out on the screen and whoops, lets change this here, and this here. Maybe they’ve got like 15 letters in their language and they’ve also got 15 fingers so they stick their 15 fingers into 15 holes and push their fingers down in different combinations to produce the different letters. It’s like playing alien piano. So we learn Spanish because it’s used in a whole lot of countries around the world and man, they drill those countries into your head almost as if they’re the ONLY reason to learn Spanish. (heh) But what if you’re like in another country and you’re in this English foreign-language class and the teacher’s like, well this is why English is important. Can you name all the countries in the world that speak English? I’ve got no idea, but hey, more important than everything else, English is the language of programming languages. That’s kind of unfair don’t you think? Programming languages are all written in English, forcing smart programmers to learn English. Then, when they make contributions, those are in English too. It’s like English has a monopoly on programming, which is great.