As a non-native speaker I would say it is absolutely necessary. You can get through university without it and you can probably get a job in your country without

As a non-native speaker I would say it is absolutely necessary. You can get through university without it and you can probably get a job in your country without it but you really shouldn't. Never ever write code in non-English. I hate it when programming is tough with localized variable names etc. Just imagine a coworker from another country being stuck with your codebase with all non-English words in it...it's a nightmare. Also the best tutorials, books etc. are in English and the most new content is released in English as well. Going a step further if you are interested in NLP it's very likely that more interesting datasets will be available in English. State of the art academic research (new algorithms etc.) will also very likely be published in English.