[raganwald]

Even if he happened to be right about his contention, this isn't the point at all. The question here is, "Should a programming service be offered in a language other than English?" Whereas ESR is claiming, "Programmers should learn to write English proficiently."

Imagine, if you will, that Silicon Valley is THE place to live if you want to be a programmer. Alice has job advice: "Move to Silicon Valley."

Now imagine that Bob wishes to open a hackerspace code+cafe in New York. Should we really tell him that this is a bad idea? Is it somehow a terrible idea to help programmers who chose to ignore Alice's advice to be productive? Is it somehow undermining TheGrandPlan™ to support a programmer in New York City?

Are we "fragmenting the hacker community" by opening a cafe in NYC?

I can't think of any good reasons not to make Stack Overflow available in Portuguese. And any or every other language. An argument to keep SO English-only might as well be accompanied by an argument that there should be no conference talks in any language except English, no programming books in any language except English, and no help or online documentation in any language except English.