Frenchman expat here. I do recall OCaml being somewhat popular among teachers and professors some 20 years ago. All the coding I learned in high school and then

Frenchman expat here. I do recall OCaml being somewhat popular among teachers and professors some 20 years ago. All the coding I learned in high school and then the first years of college was in either Basic, Pascal, OCaml or Matlab. I did not touch C or Java which were a lot more popular in the late 1990s until I started a my Softare Engineering degree. As for French not being used in keywords, I found that state of affair somewhat liberating. I learned some LOGO with French keywords in primary school, then moved on to BASIC with English keywords long before I learned English. The fact that the keywords are in a foreign language somehow helped. I was not randomly trying French words hoping that it would do something. Either I knew the "computer" word (aka English) or I did not. I find programming using French keywords somewhat distasteful. French does feel ill suited for this kind of endeavor with its complex grammar rules and conjugation. It's also very verbose. When I was in college my friends used to name things in a mixture of French and English. Yes, even native speakers that wanted to use French for variables would invariably use English keywords. For example, an accessor would be named `getUtilisateur()` instead of `getUser()`, simply because all the equivalents for `get` and `set` are super long and fastidious to type. Also everyone would be super confused if a different convention than `get` or `set` was being used in this context. But often enough the reason was that the English word was so much shorter, and as easily understood.