One of the problems of good documentation is that the documentation has to be written in English. English is now the global language, whether we like it or not. The disadvantage of English is that it is by no means an easy language to learn. Even for native speakers, the standard of teaching English is not what it was, and a lot of clarity and purpose that should be there gets lost.
This is bad in general but it's particularly bad when it comes to technical writing where precision is key. How did this come to pass, and is there anything that can be done about it?
Latin was the language of learning for the first fifteen hundred years of the common era. If you wanted to be understood, you wrote what you wanted to write in Latin, and scholars all over the world were able to read what you wrote because they spoke Latin too. Newton wrote in Latin. So did Keppler, so did Galileo, so did Descartes.
However, as Michael D Gordon points out in his excellent book Scientific Babel: How Science was Done Before and After Global English, this Latinate golden age didn't last as long as it seems. A disdain for doing documentation is not a recent phenomena and, when scientists had a chance to write in their native tongues, they let threw their Latin grammars on the fire and to hell with them.
Whatever hope Latin had of holding the line in academia, it never stood a prayer in the real world of 19th century commerce and engineering. If you had figured out a way to get another few pounds of steam out of your train engine or how a bridge could bear a little more strain, you banged it out on paper in whatever language you knew and moved on to the next way of making money. As such, French, German and English, the languages spoken in the richest countries came more and more to the fore when it came to documentation.
What is or isn't a language is as much a political as a linguistic question and, as the great powers faced off against each other in the world, so their languages did battles in academia. German was the leading scientific language up until the First World War, after which the USA took up a surprisingly insular position on languages, even going to the extent of banning the teaching of foreign languages in some states, an act of cultural-self-harm if ever there were one.
The scientists, in the meantime, tried to bypass politics by creating articificial languages, of which the most famous is Esperanto. Sadly, they could not bypass human nature and the Esperanto standard was barely published before there was a split in the organisation about which version was most pure. Everything went right down the necesejo after that.
Russian shot to prominence during the Cold War, when translators had to battle with a different alphabet as well as a different language. But once the Soviet Union collapsed Russian's claim as a language of science fell with it, leaving English dominant and untouched at the end of the twentieth century.
There was a vogue for middle class people, meeting for drinks or golf or skiing, would talk about making sure their children were taught Chinese at school, because the twenty-first was to be The Chinese Century. However, just because a language might be spoken by the most powerful country in the world, that doesn't mean that language is spoken or used by most of the inhabitants of the world.
When the Roman Empire was at its height, the spoken language of the majority of the people was not Latin, but Greek. If a Roman met a Gaul, they were more likely to converse in Greek than any other language. Similarly a Judean and a Carthaginian, a Dalmatian and a German, or any other of the polyglot tongues of the empire.
The Greeks had travelled the Mediterranean long before Rome had a navy, and their language survived them. Greek also had the advantage of the Romans being a practical people. As long as the conquered people raised their taxes and didn't step out of line the Romans couldn't give a rooty-toot-toot what barbarous tongues they spoke. Even if US power were to wane this century, it will take far longer for the deep footprints of the English language to disappear into history.