I think this is a terrible idea. First of all I am fluent in English and arabic and learning spanish, so I am not against languages.
But by having 2 communities we all lose. The spanish hackers will lose on all the great english content and the english hackers will lose on all the great spanish content.
This is how things are right now. If you want to be a programmer and compete in a global market, you need to know English.
It's not good or bad but if 20 years from now, the de facto language becomes French or German, I will learn it. For now, we are lucky that we have a ONE language development community all over the world.
How about thinking that, because some people choose to write and think in spanish, more people will be able to read those thoughts, rants, and tips, and maybe.. just maybe.. come to think: "Mmm.. I want to know more about this. I may as well try a little harder and read that english paper I found.. Who knows, maybe I can write a blog post about it and expand knowledge in my community, since there's none available in my language!"
Community means plurality as well, more so related to language when we're talking about a global one. And it's not like we're talking about learning Navajo. Spanish is the 3rd most used language in the entire world!
That's ridiculous, if only because there are lots and lots of non-English programming communities already. French, Hungarian, Russian, Chinese obviously. Knowing English is a good tool, but the actual fact of the matter is that there already are monolingual Spanish-speaking programmers out of the 400 million native speakers of Spanish, and clearly you can't say that they shouldn't have a community.
A good analogy to use is c# and VB in .net. I was a VB developer and when C# was born, I didn't want to learn it because I can do everything in VB. It's the same framework so the language didn't matter. Overtime almost 99% of code examples and open source projects were written in C# and I ended up moving to c# and haven't written VB code (and don't want to) in several years.
My point is, you want to blog/collaborate in spanish/frensh or whatever language? Go for it. But you have just considerably shrunk your audience and network and greatly diminished your chances of giving or getting help.
PS: Wikipedia is different than code and is not a good analogy. If I want to learn about Cancer/Golden Retriever/Panama Canal/etc.. then yes, I want to read it in my native language.
On that one.. I'm all for multiple languages, but man, the Spanish version is so behind the English one.. I wish the Spanish version had more resources/members..
But by having 2 communities we all lose. The spanish hackers will lose on all the great english content and the english hackers will lose on all the great spanish content.
This is how things are right now. If you want to be a programmer and compete in a global market, you need to know English.
It's not good or bad but if 20 years from now, the de facto language becomes French or German, I will learn it. For now, we are lucky that we have a ONE language development community all over the world.