Presumably, we are now in a situation where it is actually more difficult to learn computer programming if you happen to have had the misfortune to be born into

Presumably, we are now in a situation where it is actually more difficult to learn computer programming if you happen to have had the misfortune to be born into a 'non-western' language and, to some extent, even non-english. That is an absurd situation and means that, as a collective species, we are wasting a huge amount of resources and potential. Definitely something we should look to resolve. Having a drop-down for variables certainly isn't a solution, granted. Hopefully, there are some more sensible compromises - e.g. being able to specify a locale-dependent subset of unicode in your personal environment, appropriate use of metadata to describe the language of a file, etc.