> Okay, but what about error messages? A good error message tries to convey the nature of the error in a complete sentence or sentence fragment. That's a fair

> Okay, but what about error messages? A good error message tries to convey the nature of the error in a complete sentence or sentence fragment. That's a fair point. I think I saw some compilers with translated error messages, which would solve that problem. But it was a long time ago, so I'm not sure. However, that is an issue external to the programming language per se. > Comments are often written in English. Documentation is often only available in English. When you get a programming book translated to Polish, comments are going to be written in Polish. Manpages have translations into many languages. As for library documentation, it's long past the point of an introductory programming course. > Tooling suffers the same issue. Non English speakers are forced to learn English if they want mastery of the programming language, and this goes beyond mere symbol mappings. True. However, I think it pays off big time. I think a world where people are forced to learn a language that everybody speaks is a much better world than one where different regions of the world have siloed repositories of knowledge, and collaboration can only happen on short distances. I think too often people complain that they need to learn A, in order to do B, even when A dramatically broadens their horizons and lifts the ceiling on what they can achieve. It's similar to the common antipathy towards being required to learn maths, if you want to do game engine programming, physics, etc. Without grasping a good chunk of maths, you're not going to be a good game engine developer or physicist. Same with English. Without it you're not going to be able to efficiently collaborate with others. Documentation is just one instance. There is also the usual asking questions on forums, reading blog posts, research papers. Those things may sound like restrictions to some, when in fact they're the opposite.