I found Atwood's post to be very anglocentric. While for practical purposes it's probably a good idea for any programmer to be functionally literate in English,

I found Atwood's post to be very anglocentric. While for practical purposes it's probably a good idea for any programmer to be functionally literate in English, I certainly don't think they should all use it all the time. I'm Canadian, and I grew up in a very multicultural city. This may have something to do with my views on these issues. In my first programming job, several co-workers were Chinese and amongst themselves usually spoke Mandarin. At a programming competition I attended a few years ago, several teams were from Quebec and most of them spoke French within their team. All these people could speak English, but chose not to because they were more comfortable speaking their native languages, even about technical issues. I think this is pretty normal, and will continue to be for the foreseeable future.