Which is a significant barrier of entry for western developers and may actually be part of the reason why MRI is not nearly as good as it could be (less eyes looking at it).
I've experienced this myself twice so far, with Ruby and with TokyoCabinet (earlier HyperEstraier). Upon investigation of lower-level problems I would eventually hit a brick-wall in the disguise of a japanese mailing list.
This seems to be improving for Ruby nowadays, but I did actually stop using HyperEstraier (years ago, before the rise of SOLR) for this reason.
One counter-example could be nginx where lots of discussion still happens in russian, yet the code-quality remains excellent. This is more of an outlier than a role-model, though. Most projects are not blessed with a lead-developer as talented as Igor.
I've experienced this myself twice so far, with Ruby and with TokyoCabinet (earlier HyperEstraier). Upon investigation of lower-level problems I would eventually hit a brick-wall in the disguise of a japanese mailing list.
This seems to be improving for Ruby nowadays, but I did actually stop using HyperEstraier (years ago, before the rise of SOLR) for this reason.
One counter-example could be nginx where lots of discussion still happens in russian, yet the code-quality remains excellent. This is more of an outlier than a role-model, though. Most projects are not blessed with a lead-developer as talented as Igor.