[zug_zug]

I'm not sure if you meant this as evidence for or against my point, but this is exactly what I mean.

Every year dozens of people think they're going to make some holy-grail language and it's 1% different from the prior version but now every single library needs to be rewritten, a dozen years of patches/bugs/security-holes must happen, whole resumes get shined up rewriting tech stacks that were perfectly capable, all for it to be thrown for the next shiny toy in less than a decade.

A new language just fractures knowledge.

[cess11]

Is that how you see people that know several natural languages? You think they're intellectually fractured?

[zug_zug]

I don't really get what you're getting at here.

It sounds like you're trying to draw some equivalence between multiple spoken languages (largely seen as something brag-worthy-ish) and multiple programming languages. Like if culture thinks it's sexy to know french that somehow that means it's sexy to know Cobol [It's not].

The two are wildly different of course, a programming language can be learned in weeks and a spoken language takes years.

But if your question is -- would the world be a better place if we all spoke the same language? Then yes, absolutely.

Fortunately AI will help continue to reduce these artificial barriers between languages.

[cess11]

I'd consider a person that has only studied programming for weeks extremely junior.

Edit: And no, "AI" is not going to affect any such barriers. It's already trivial to learn new natural languages, and some people do, some don't. Those who don't, generally don't care about people that speak other languages than the one they learned in childhood.