[masterponomo]

Makes me think about programming IN a foreign language. One time we had to fix some code a Turkish client had added to our system. The spec and the code were in Turkish (imagine Turkish COBOL if you will). We somehow got it done by trial and error (Is THIS what you want? No? How about THIS?) I have no idea whether this means anything, but we came away saying "Berklat bokari" to each other at random moments on future assignments. Those words or something like them kept appearing in the Turkish code.

[luminarious]

For a lot of the world population, english, as common as it may be in programming, is still a foreign language. People less fluent in English are that much less likely to try scripting something. Not only would the language keywords make little to no sense, but the supporting materials and comments as well.

[TazeTSchnitzel]

Thanks to the British Empire and partly to the United States, English is effectively the international language of Business, though.

[adrianhoward]

Yup. I had this sort of problem once. The code for an interactive television set-top box was written in a pseudo-assembler-ish language. It had been built and designed by French-Canadians and the assembler acronyms were based on French words.

Having pretty much zero French myself this was often non-trivial for me :-)

(Fascinating hardware though. This was pre-digital interactive television. Ran on four separate analog signals with the set-top box switching between them based on the code and what the user did. Ran on the Videotron cable network in the UK for a while before they were swallowed up into CWC. If any UK Videotron viewers remember things like "Gone to the Dogs" I worked on those :-)