> The tech community greatly benefits from settling on a lingua franca

Maybe we see that in a few years, with everything moving to Chinese.

> Imagine if everyone posted on StackExchange using their native tongue.

Imagine users going to forums in their own language. People actually do that.

People have been talking about "everything will be moving to Chinese in the next few years" for the last ~20 years.

I'm well aware. But China is also the only country (or even bloc) in the world that's aiming for a fully internal supply chain for high tech. Not sure you can transform basic materials into a laptop (to pick one simple example) at scale without China anymore, but China is on a pretty successful track to do that without anybody else.

Once they get there, I'm not sure they have a lot of motivation left to do high-tech on foreigners' terms and in foreign languages.

While it doesn't follow that "we" need to learn Chinese then, whatever they'll use instead of StackExchange will simply outnumber the English version.

For hardware, perhaps, but the Chinese have no realistic way to replace the rest of the world for software. If they want to sell their hardware to the rest of the world, English is the only realistic language to use for that. I see no evidence of mass learning of Chinese anywhere.

The replacement for StackExchange already exists, on WeChat. More for hardware than for software.

Probably the Chinese will embrace and extend the English language, the way the US did.

The US did not embrace english, the US were a set of english colonists who managed to absorb lots of foreigners with the clear contract that not adapting to their culture/language would result in bad outcomes.