[MaxBarraclough]

> For some reason people don't assume the same about natural languages.

As mumblemumble says, I think this is due to a blinkered understanding of programming, combined with the mistaken belief that if you know one programming language it's pretty straightforward to learn any other language.

If someone knows Java, Python, and JavaScript, and their idea of exotic languages are Rust and Go, then they have no appreciation of how diverse programming languages really are. Lisp, Haskell, Forth, Prolog, and assembly, will strike them as completely alien, which should be fine except they're under the impression that it's meant to be easy to learn another language.