[phowat]

If you're a programmer and you're not comfortable with english, you better become. Fast. There's just no way around it and I think it's a good thing, it means less fragmentation of knowledge. Remember when Nginx documentation was almost entirely in russian? Yeah, it sucked.

ps: English is not my first language

[Kronopath]

While it's true that learning English is very important and helpful for non-English-speaking programmers, they address this concern (as it applies to pt.SO) directly in the article. Translated for those who can't read:

We didn't think that having the site one language only would be a problem. After all, most programmers speak English, right? Even programming languages themselves are in English, isn't that right? But we forgot something very important:

We weren't writing a technical manual. We were building a community.

It took a while, but we finally understood what most of you already knew. It's very difficult to be part of a community that, literally, doesn't speak your language.

The point they're trying to make here is that it's one thing to read technical documentation in your non-native language, but it's quite another to try and constructively participate in a community, where there's a lot of complex, back-and-forth discussions, and things need to be explained clearly.

It's true that, for an individual developer, learning English well will open up these sorts of communities. But so long as people aren't yet doing that, communities like pt.SO will be a big help.

[phowat]

Did you guys consider doing something like Simple English Wikipedia instead of a different language? From my experience ( I know, I know, anecdotal evidence) with non-native english speakers using english they seem to be most worried about making mistakes, if they are talking to someone who is also not a native speaker they tend to communicate better simply due to worrying less.

[sentenza]

Simple English does not work for non-native speakers and here is why:

Everybody is exposed to some English, but not all people are exposed to the same English. Every non-native speaker is using available media to learn the language, so you'll have people who know bad newspaper English, then people fluent in TV-Drama English and finally those speaking and writing "Broken English" (looking at you, facebook, 4chan, etc.).

So people will be _using_ non-intersecting vocabularies in their own contributions. They would actually have to learn Simple English as another skill first.

[sentenza]

For me personally, this has become less of an issue in the last few years. I can't remember the last time I was unable to extract the meaning from a text fragent of interest. If you know a handful languages and substitute the rest with those ubiquitous translation services, there is little that remains inaccessible.

I'm still hoping for a babelfish universe in which a combination of technology and our own mental meaning recognition facilities makes languages a non-issue.

Of course, at this point your mileage may vary. I'd probably not be writing this if 90% of the text I encountered was Chinese, since I have to rely 100% on translation tools to read that. But we're getting there (hopefully).

[stingraycharles]

Yeah, it's even worse when people use their native language in code comments or, god forbid, variable names. There suddenly is no way of collaboration with people who aren't familiar with your native language.

[Adirael]

I once inherited an spaghetti PHP project with everything (code, comments and documentation) written in swedish. It was awful.

[walshemj]

Well at one place we had a mix of Portuguese, English and Polish in out comments.

And much longer ago I had to work on a PET BASIC program for a RnD project for BS 5750 (aka ISO 9000) all of the comments where in Gaelic :-)