I learn a lot by following GitHub - etalab/transport-site: Rendre disponible, valoriser et améliorer les données transports · GitHub
Can you recommend any similar codebases written in English? I’m seeking similar, in terms of code base, team size, open practices and government support?
Well, I think it’s fine to comment or document code in languages other than English, since we can easily translate full sentences back to English or any other langage. For a single word taken out from its context, that won’t be the same thing though. I’m talking about variables and functions names, here…
However, upon quickly reviewing the repository you’re sharing, I noticed that apart from the comments, the names of variables, functions, and modules all seem to be in English. This would make it easy for a non-French speaking programmer to work on this as well.
One aspect of English that I appreciate is that comments or variable names in my code are generally quite short, even without resorting to abbreviations.
And since most programming languages, database languages, and essential system tools like the shell have their syntax in English anyway, it makes sense to go with the flow, because you’re already immersed in it anyway.
For instance, I attempted to name an Elixir module with an accented French word or a word in Japanese characters, and I immediately received an error message stating that such characters are not permitted.
It’s a bit off-topic, but the thing I still find most challenging in English (because it’s not my native language) is speaking and listening. For this reason, I prefer written books and programming guides over video courses and tutorials. I know there are tools for translating speech into text, but I don’t find it enjoyable at all to read automatically translated subtitles when watching a video on YouTube. The translation is far from satisfactory for me, and it’s exhausting to keep pausing to read everything.
It makes sense only in “West World”. Think what would happen if people from China would suddenly spread across all countries. In that case English would no longer be a top 1 natural language. BRICKS for example have something like half of total population. I would not be surprised if many countries with a big budget have translated the core resources. That’s said I think that I saw few sites already. One for sure is elixirschool.com which supports 25 languages and that’s open source project. If there would be only one language for writing a code then I would prefer Esperanto even if I not have learned it yet. 
Not really, it’s just that English is mostly accepted as the world language. Sure there are literal billions of people speaking Chinese and Hindu but again, if a local company needs remote contractors then they’ll need their code be in English.
Until there’s another universal / world language then English it is. Resisting this is pointless IMO.
Making lingua franca discussions political is entirely wrong in my opinion. Language is tool for people to understand each other. For example, medicine is speaking Latin, though there are no Latin native speakers left. It is just that there was already a language with a ton of terms, and it made no sense to invent terms in a new one.
And it definitely makes no sense to talk about lingua franca from point of popularity, fairness or politics.
English and Mandarin languages have almost the same amount of speakers. And Mandarin is still the top 1 language by native speakers. So we already live in the world you’ve described, and English is still the lingua franca, and it is most definitely the lingua franca in CS and SE
Coming back to software development, we are finally living in UTF8 world, and no matter what flaws it has, it is better to live in a world where every text has exactly the same encoding, opposed to world with different encodings.
I thought that already happened, otherwise what am I doing? 
English won. In a sense it is easier for us Chinese: it is a vastly different language so we code switch: Chinese in private life, English in professional life. I guess it is a bit harder for people native to a European language; it might be tempted to mix up the 2.
Off-topic: I do the same with books I read for pleasure. I speak English on a level that impresses British and Americans but I can’t make myself read a normal book in English. If it’s not in my native tongue then I don’t want it. Guess my brain forever associated English with work.
In my current job in Germany, we handle it the same: Code must be written in English, while documentation and comments should be German. I once had a C# codebase with German names for classes and methods, but reading it felt really awkward.
When reimplementing parts of it in Ruby, I switched to English names. Pluralization in Rails was another pain point. Thanks for not pluralizing tables and controllers in Phoenix, btw.
One reason for localized names may be doing DDD in German or whatever language and not translating the ubiquitous language to English. But that should be business people and domain experts job, not software engineers.
