Back in 2023, Andrej Karpathy said “the hottest new programming language is English“, one of those sounds-very-clever tweets that continues to pop up like a mad Auntie at a wedding propping up a family myth.
Turns out the best Open English-understanding models are Chinese-developed. Hugging Face’s trending models are dominated by Chinese companies, with Alibaba’s Qwen series leading alongside models from other Chinese firms. The universe has a sense of humour.
The Cognitive Shift
English dominance in software has been America’s quiet advantage for decades. Every programming language uses English keywords. Every Stack Overflow answer assumes English fluency. The advantage created a natural moat around American tech thinking.
Google’s Addy Osmani once noted that “AI tools help experienced developers more than beginners.” When those tools come from Chinese companies, American developers learn to work within frameworks designed by Chinese engineers. The influence is subtle but real.
Programming An Infrastructure Play
America still controls the hardware. Those H100 GPUs powering AI training come from Nvidia. Chinese companies are increasingly prominent in the software layer, building the models that developers actually use.
Chinese companies are embracing radical openness with their models whilst American ones retreat behind API walls. OpenAI doesn’t publish weights. Anthropic doesn’t share training data. Meanwhile, Alibaba releases complete architectures for anyone to use, modify, and improve.
The Internet runs on Open Source Software, this strategy is forward-thinking not altruism. When your model becomes the foundation for thousands of projects, you become the infrastructure. When developers worldwide learn to think in your patterns, you shape how problems get solved.
The Long View
English won’t remain the singular programming language forever. Today’s dominance is a historical blip from American technological leadership in the twentieth century. Languages follow power, and power shifts.
LLMs work in all languages. Chinese models already handle Mandarin beautifully. As these systems improve, the advantage of English documentation diminishes. A programmer in Shenzhen won’t need English to access the best tools.
What Comes Next
The American century is winding down. The tools that matter are becoming global, and Chinese companies understand the transition better than their American counterparts.
Natural language programming promises to make coding more accessible. The companies building these AI systems will inevitably shape how developers think about problems and solutions.
English is the language of programming, for now.
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