I'm a Québecois from Canada and a native French speaker, and I wasn't fluent in English before my early 20s because I grew up in far away from big centers in a rural area. For those who don't know in Québec the preservation of the French language is a very big issue and a lot of resources are spent to keep French the official language. It's also a big quite popular political issue, it's not for nothing all of the Canadians PMs learn French, they need those seats. So I think I'm in the right place to talk about this subject.

> One type of diversity that is rarely talked about, in my opinion, is linguistic diversity. Unfortunately, in an area such as computer science where English has been the lingua franca from the very beginning

> Many developers, mostly native English speakers, will tell you, in good faith, that the language problem is secondary, that you just need to contribute the code.

No quite the contrary, thank God for having a tech lingua franca from the very beginning of the industry that is relatively easy to learn and parse with a computer. I say that as someone who also dabbled a little bit in German, Mandarin and Japanese. Seriously diversity has become a meme at this point.

I've seen and worked with both sides of the medal. Code and documentation with French, French with English terms allowed, English code but French comments... it always ends up in a Frenglish creole language that only a small fraction of people can easily read. Plain English, please. For the love of clarity and common sense.

In Québec we have the infamous "language police", called the "French Language Office" or "French Language Orifice" as all my native French colleagues used to call it. They force companies to have French software everywhere, and then it's up to the employees to undo this mess. Usually this is fine if you're not doing programming or other non-tech related stuff such as HR, but for the rest of us please please please just don't.