Eh, I had to support a codebase where the comments where in inproperly encoded cryllic. But happily the code was a php app that had lots of large hand crafted if soups for handling dates, so I'm pretty sure the comments were useless anyway.

Yeah I have seen that. It highlights the one weakness of text based code formats - still prevaling for a good reason.

Multiple languages for developers is kind of a fringe case for functionality seen more in importers and fantranslaters.

> It highlights the one weakness of text based code formats

This is why I program exclusively in Piet

In the current status quo your nightmare scenario (having to debug a codebase with comments in a diffeeent language) is precisely the everyday reality for non-English speaking devs. A Japanese dev could easily make the same comment as you, the difference being he actually has to deal with situation in question on a daily basis.

You could make the argument that English is the "lingua franca" but the phrase itself demonstrates just how ephemeral that is. I've lived in places before where a generation ago Russian was taught as a "lingua franca". Nowadays you would be hard-pressed to find anybody with a good understanding of Russian (good enough to understand technical documentation) there, even amongst ethnic Russians.

The internet has changed what it means to be the Lingua Franca. The ubiquity of English language in the largest internet communities and high quality media content would have to have a very strange reason to change. Before, it was simply a function of your colonizer or trading partners.