I have always felt English works as a language to interact with computers pretty well, perhaps one of the best or the best. It could be argued this is just because I speak it as a primary language, but this article illuminates exactly why I believe it is a good candidate. Our character set is very small and very simple, which is important. There are sets with fewer (the indigenous Hawaiian language IIRC has 13 letters), but English is also very widespread, and words don't wind up crazy long (like in Hawaiian).
Other European languages with the Latin alphabet could be fair contenders as well because of this, although the ones with accents are a bit more complex, and none of them are as widespread that I am aware of.
So actually really what I'm getting at is not 'go English!' but 'go Latin alphabet!'
I believe Hebrew would work pretty well too. There are 22 letters, it's also phonetically very similar to Latin characters. Most words are also shorter in Hebrew, but are phonetically equivalent to an English sounding word. For example, "Comment" could be "כמנת", thus 4 characters instead of 6, and are phonetically equivalent.
Suddenly another interesting thing springs to mind. Punctuation has become all kinds of useful for computers in the shell, in programming, etc. Things like / for folders is intuitive and easy to see. Do many other languages, particularly the better candidates w/ lower letter counts such as Hebrew, have punctuation beyond the period?
Edit: good for them, Hebrew does have punctuation.
Hebrew does, but only really because it imported it from modern European languages recently. Classical Hebrew and the religious Hebrew of the middle ages didn't have much in the way of punctuation, but when it was revived in the 19th century as a living language by European Zionists, it borrowed (adapted versions of) the punctuation common to European languages of the time.
I'm a Hebrew speaker, and I really doubt it. Whenever I get some technological appliance that can speak Hebrew, I turn it to English.
One of the big reasons is that Hebrew is right-to-left, which is a nightmare. You can't even type Facebook comments in Hebrew and have them correctly aligned.
If we'd started with Hebrew, it would be left-to-right that would be the nightmare. That's just because we've got left-to-right ground in deeply in our software, not for a fundamental physical reason (in the way that vertical orientation is arguably less useful to humans as our field-of-view is a horizontal elliptical shape, not a sphere or vertical shape).
Other European languages with the Latin alphabet could be fair contenders as well because of this, although the ones with accents are a bit more complex, and none of them are as widespread that I am aware of.
So actually really what I'm getting at is not 'go English!' but 'go Latin alphabet!'