What do you mean English being the lingua franca is not a good thing? Do you mean it's bad, or it just is what it is? I think there's benefit to having a universal language, but it doesn't have to be English...
A lingua franca's ideal should be to be easy to learn, able to express lots of things. English is easy to start with, but hard to master, and its expressiveness isn't ideal either, often having to import words from other languages where english has no word for a concept itself.
I'm betting on a symbolic referential language as becoming the defacto standard for programming binary machines. From my cursory glance at Mandarin, I see a lot of similarities with expressing code.
