Thanks for this discussion, Jeff.
Jurgen Appelo wrote a great post entitled Thank You, Stupid Americans which covers similar ground.
At one point he states:
I think most software developers are now glad that the unique combination of American imperialism and stupidity has resulted in all computer languages and frameworks being presented in one simple language: English.
For more check out:
http://www.noop.nl/2008/04/thank-you-stupi.html
That is right!We must learn English before learnning program.Terrible!
Why are British people so snobbish about the spellings of certain words? I mean, seriously, wanting to stab the compiler because of a slight difference of dialect? Seriously?
@MKR I could learn another language, but where would I use it? Have you ever been to Miami? 
Here (South Miami), Spanish is the real lingua franca of the street. .
English is the standard language for science, period.
I study electronic engineering, in Italy. As I go on I find always that most of the informations I need are written in English, and thatās not a problem, at least for me.
Anyway, every paper in every scientific journal is in English, it could be math, electronics, physics and programming! Everything you read about science in a language that is not English is old. Research is done in English.
And last but not least, is there someone of you who prefer the localized version of the DD handbook?
PS:
At least English is easier than Latin 
Great discussion.
Here in Brazil professionals often choose to program in English. One advantage of english is that it makes variables, class and methods names shorter. For example, in english you can use AccountManager instead ManagerOfAccount, while in portuguese the first case donāt exist, so it would be GerenciadorDeConta. Moreover, words in english are in most cases shorter, like get, set, run, save, find, etc.
I do think that to programm well you will need read tutorials, manuals and techinical articles that are written in English. Good programmers have to speak and read in English.
http://www.pactotransportes.com.br
Great post!
Thanks.
I also thought English was the common language for hackers.
Turns out that on our site wechall.net 10/23 listed Hacker Challenge sites are not in english at all.
There are programmers who do their job without knowing English well. Although itās harder, you can just stick to translated books and other material in your (non-English) language.
Some people may know enough English to read it if they have to, but prefer ease of reading their native language even if manual is one revision behind.
These programmers create fantastic niches for non-English books, blogs, news, etc.
Interesting. I have laboriously used programs written in languages other than English and found their documentation to be somewhat lacking. Iām now wondering if thatās because of poor translation to English, or lack of facility to express details in the original language.
Iām from Poland, and Iāve learn English by playing games on C64 and trying to read documentation in English. Also - after Iāve installed my first Linux - from reading fortunes 
But - my problem is Iāve learn English by reading, and I always pronounced it in my thoughts like Iād read Polish. So now I speak English with mostly Polish phonetics, it sounds funny and not really like English. Still, I can communicate.
Funny thing is - when I read article on internet, later I often have troubles with finding it again, because I forget in which language it was.
PS. in my company we recently write code with English identifiers. We now have identifiers like GenerateSkladanki, RealShips
Romanian programmer here.
This extends not only to the programming language and programming documentation, but also to the operating system interface.
I mean I never felt more lost than when looking at a romanian localized version of Windows XP.
Iām not ready to call you ugly, Jeff. But I do think that youāre being a bit insular and short-sighted.
The truth is that some programming languages support comments, strings, and identifiers that use any UNICODE symbol you want. (a href=http://jeffmatherphotography.com/dispatches/2006/10/_world_programm/Hereās an example in Perl/a.) That means that you can write your companyās programs and systems in your native language, harnessing a pool of local talent that doesnāt write English, and then localize it into English when youāre done. (If thatās even important.)
Of course, programmers will need to know enough to handle the English-inspired keywords and APIs of the library, but Iām continually amazed by the power and subtlety of Google Translate. Soon using English (or non-English) code wonāt be much harder for the non-native speaker than using the code written by the newb in the cube next to you or the code you wrote five years ago.
If you Americans donāt stop abusing our language weāll revoke your license to use it and then how will you communicate with each other?
Ughā¦ That link was supposed to go here:
http://jeffmatherphotography.com/dispatches/2006/10/_world_programm/
I am from The Netherlands, English is the third language I learned (I went to an international school in Basel, Switzerland, learned German as my second language) and English is all I use when programming. Books written in Dutch for programming donāt make sense to me, they donāt feel genuine and most of them have mistakes or contain a lot of English anyway, might as well stick with English.
If those idiots didnāt put support for foreign languages into the wysiwig machines English would have won by now.
Sincerely, a true āUgly Americanā.
Oh, by the way, we arenāt the only UGLY ones.
A storyā¦
I was in MontrĆ©al a few years ago (in the 80ās) and I was on Center Street, french bars on one side, English bars on the other.
I met a group, unbeknownst to me at the time, of french separatist.
The very attractive dark hair french girl invited me upstairs with her and several of her āfriendsā. I should have known better, they were all dressed in black from head to toe.
After sitting with them at a table for a few minutes I very politely asked her if they could speak English as I do not understand one word of french.
She very impolitely screamed in french:
āManger la merde et mourir!ā.
The in English:
āYou dammed Americans. You come up here with your dammed English and expect us to speak it.ā
Then she screamed a few more things in french and I noticed that
the four burly fellows across from me were getting out of their chairs and I did not like the way they were staring at meā¦
I ran for my life, down the stairs, across the street, into an English pub and right into the Australian National Rugby Team.
I told them what had happened and they piled out the door to ask the frenchmen what their problem wasā¦
I have never seen anyone in the US go berserk if their asked to speak french, German, Italian, etcā¦
We I am sorry to inform you but English is not an American language. You may want to bash Americans because its popular. Americans adopted english as its language. (Hint it came from another contry). When the country was formed the took a vote between German and English. I understand it was close. So you think English is hard to learn!!! Try German. 200 years ago this country decided to standardise on one language. Many other countries have done the same. It does not mean English is better, it just means its a standard.