I sometimes ask new parents if they'll choose English or C as the first foreign language.
So far nobody has opted for C.
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Its because C is a bad first language, I remember when I first started programming what was really exciting to me was seeing something working. Beyond simple "hello world" type applications, C is going to take a lot more work. Its a great language, very useful for building things. However what makes it great is what makes it bad for first timers.
C#, or javascript, maybe python would be good languages in my opinion.
If that's your criteria for a good first language, then I'd say shell script. You already need to know a subset of the shell and its commands anyway, to be able to use the computer in the first place. So from there, learning the programming-language aspects of it is a natural progression.
That's the joke /wolfcastle.
How exactly do you (we?) expect someone who doesn't know English to become a programmer?
Sorry to break it to you, but you can't have one without the other.
I've seen French and German code that got by with no significant English (outside whatever wrapped the core functions).
It's easier in some languages than in others.
Back in the good old BASIC days, there were even hacks to make those tokenizing interpreters on home computers use German symbols for their keywords. (nice side effect of the tokenized representation: the code remained compatible)
Excel and {Open,Libre}Office Calc work with localized symbols for their functions, too.
I think I've even seen a C header file that wrapped keywords (through macros), types and libc names in translated versions. Luckily those are rare...
So, programming without English is possible - but I really wouldn't recommend it.
I knew what most of the BASIC keywords did on the computer before I understood their meaning in english. I'm not sure I even completely grasped that they were words in a language until then.
But yeah, english is pretty undisputed as the lingua franca of most things computer, and so developing professionally beyond a certain threshold is difficult without english.
Fortunately I only ask people who understand that it's a joke.
I learnt how to program before learning English. Most of my colleagues aren't really fluent in English, and yet they can write code.
That's why we have assembly instructions. Hex-values are language agnostic