If you take the position that every codebase everywhere must be available to and understood by every programmer everywhere, sure, you have to settle on a common

If you take the position that every codebase everywhere must be available to and understood by every programmer everywhere, sure, you have to settle on a common language. Luckily, I don't think anybody takes that position, or at least takes it seriously. But there are plenty of monolingual dev teams out there whose shared language isn't English and isn't written in ASCII. Why should they be forced to write code in English if nobody who works with it is an English speaker? I already regularly see people post questions to Stack Overflow and mailing lists and IRC where names of classes and functions and variables are ASCII but not English (i.e., someone writes a class called "Utilisateur", not "User"). Why not let them just use their language fully?