I think it's a problem when your project goes international. You have to choose a language to communicate with the larger community.
Some countries do not have this problem, the Anglo-Saxon world can communicate with a common language, they are inflated by the Indian community that generally uses English in their communication as well.
India, with its many official languages, is a living example of how this can be a problem in Science and Technical communities, restricting our problem to programming you'll hardly see an Indian developer starting a project and documenting it in Marathi, Hindi, Urdu, Tamil or Malayalam (or others with more than 10 million speakers).
This can be a problem, so you have to decide very early how you'll approach this problem, Linus Torvalds for example chose English in the beginning instead of his native Swedish. The Lua developers chose a similar route, since they native language is Portuguese, I do not know much about Python, but I expect that Guido also chose English to communicate with developers instead of Dutch. Ruby apparently took another way, some people sees this as a problem, others don't, personally I would not like to work in a project in which I cannot ask some guys directly because we do not know a common language to communicate.
For me English is a easy choice since the majority of people learn some English in school or college, or even playing games.
Some countries do not have this problem, the Anglo-Saxon world can communicate with a common language, they are inflated by the Indian community that generally uses English in their communication as well.
India, with its many official languages, is a living example of how this can be a problem in Science and Technical communities, restricting our problem to programming you'll hardly see an Indian developer starting a project and documenting it in Marathi, Hindi, Urdu, Tamil or Malayalam (or others with more than 10 million speakers).
This can be a problem, so you have to decide very early how you'll approach this problem, Linus Torvalds for example chose English in the beginning instead of his native Swedish. The Lua developers chose a similar route, since they native language is Portuguese, I do not know much about Python, but I expect that Guido also chose English to communicate with developers instead of Dutch. Ruby apparently took another way, some people sees this as a problem, others don't, personally I would not like to work in a project in which I cannot ask some guys directly because we do not know a common language to communicate.
For me English is a easy choice since the majority of people learn some English in school or college, or even playing games.