The replies so far have been excellent and I do appreciate the time given to write them. Being a lazy one-language American (I tried to learn Spanish but I've forgotten most of what I learned out of lack of use) I'm not familiar with the obstacles to learning English beyond "gittin rid my accint" when I was real little.
Several of you brought up a counterpoint Wired hadn't considered - that having a common language facilitates cooperation around the globe. Some large projects like Drupal, WordPress, and PHP itself couldn't be undertaken without a common tongue. A colleague of mine at word pointed out that there are preprocessors out there such as antlr that can translate the language of a file into the tokens the compiler will recognize. It seems an adequate solution, but I don't know for sure. Still, an interesting discussion overall. Thanks.
