<p>I have often wondered why it is that non-English speaking programmers are forced to use a different language when programming when it would seem to be so easy to offer an IDE that could replace keywords with localized versions. Why can't the Germans use a "während..macht" loop?</p>

<p>Do programmers in Japan, Germany, France, Spain, Botswana just make extensive use of macros/define statements to make life more tolerable or do they just get used to the functional significance of print, if, then, while, do, begin, end, var, double, function, etc?</p>

<p>Perhaps the increased use of frameworks (J2EE/.NET) makes this more complicated, but it still seems worthwhile. On the other hand, if Klingon became the de-facto programming language in the US I'd probably regret suggesting this.</p>

In most programming languages, keywords are reserved, so they can't be used for variable names etc.
Now suppose the keywords changed every time you changed culture - code written in one culture couldn't be ported to another without changing identifiers. Ick. Furthermore, when anyone copied their code onto a question forum like this, we'd no longer be speaking the same language, as it were.
There are distinct advantages to only having one culture in the programming language itself...