> it's [...] hard to justify learning a foreign language [...] to a normal adult person's cost-benefit analysis.
A "normal" existence in a populous, monolingual country may not involve other languages... But human language is remarkably various in the world. Even on HN, knowing a set of non-natural semantics (e.g. coding) is a common profession.
Most employers don't pay handsomely for multilingualism, but they do pay software workers well.
I... don't really understand what this comment means.
I don't see why the situation would be any different if your airdropped, say, a 25 year old person who grew up in eg quadrilingual Luxembourg into eg extremely monolingual Yakutsk, and act like their childhood means they can suddenly master the native tongue there without hundreds to thousands of hours of unpaid effort.
They would probably do a lot better spending that time, well, getting out of Yakutsk. Assuming no one is holding them there at gunpoint.
To focus on the linguistic challenge of living in Yakutsk, we can agree that a) learning a new language takes time, and b) the Luxembourgish languages might be some help (but not much) for learning Turkic and Russian.
> act like their childhood means they can suddenly master the native tongue
But there are many cases where those languages would be an advantage. Say, in learning Spanish and English.
People can and do learn languages. Some people are better at it than others. But people emigrate (or escape, as you say) and adapt.
Programming languages are a (simplified) subset of human languages. Programmers learn a marketable skill. (I use about five programming languages at work.) Employers will pay people well for programming -- better than I have seen people paid for speaking several human languages.
The way that people complain about programming languages (simplified as they are!) is somewhat related to broader struggles with learning human languages.
Person A: "Learning X is a poor use of time for almost everyone. Here are some numbers."
Person B: "And yet some people learn X! And X is superficially similar to Y, which tons of people do with much less time investment for much more money! Checkmate!"
I have no idea what your actual argument here is. This follow up isn't doing any favors.
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My experience is that you reach "fluency" in your first programming language in about an order of magnitude less time than you can any human language. Python took me about a summer of teenage study at about 2 hours a day to feel comfortable with. Most further programming languages took an order of magnitude time less than that.
Human languages by contrast demand no less from the vast majority of people than 1000 hours of practice in the easiest cases for one to feel comfortable with them. There is a reason you can major in Swedish at Harvard but not Python. It is the same reason you can graduate having majored in Swedish at Harvard without actually being fluent in Swedish. It's the same reason. 1000 hours is a long time, and that is as easy as it gets.
You are drawing a strange and false equivalence between these two things, and I'm just not really sure what your point is. If your point is "these are secretly the same activity", my strongest response is "quantity has a quality all its own".
A "normal" existence in a populous, monolingual country may not involve other languages... But human language is remarkably various in the world. Even on HN, knowing a set of non-natural semantics (e.g. coding) is a common profession.
Most employers don't pay handsomely for multilingualism, but they do pay software workers well.