I need to start saving citations for this sort of thing to back what I'm about to say. From what I've seen, many international [0] programmers I've seen prefer

I need to start saving citations for this sort of thing to back what I'm about to say. From what I've seen, many international [0] programmers I've seen prefer English documentation for their tools and largely work with English. A large reason for that is because programming languages are (almost?) if not entirely in English. Take a look at Japanese developed Ruby. What language are the keywords in? Not rōmanized Japanese, but English! I remember reading a post here on HN just a few days ago from a Swedish programmer. When he developed a tool - he wrote the documentation in English. A dependency for his project had both Swedish and English documentation available. He used the English documentation, even though his first language is Swedish. Unless you are targeting an audience in a specific region (i.e India) - I would say i18n isn't very important. It's more important for end-users of a product that wants a global reach. What's most important is to have examples in your documentation that can help explain themselves and show how the language is used. [0] When I say foreign/international I mean countries where the official language isn't English. I feel the need to clarify this because it bothers me.