1. They're not that different. Once you've learned a few, picking up new ones is pretty easy.

2. They're much easier to learn than human languages.

To answer your first question: I probably wouldn't stop using english myself, but I don't think I'd teach it to my children.

Thus to get my (and the article's) point, you need not just stop teaching it to children, you have to completely erase the underlying knowledge the language holds and start over in a new language. This is the point: you lose much more than what appears on first glance.

And concerning programming languages, I don't see how picking up brainfuck for example is easy, but someone still put the effort into creating it. Imagine a universe in which you'd have to solve every single programming problem in C. You could dream up all sorts of programming language concepts, but you could never use any other language than C. I bet you'd find that a bit boring and tedious...

Make no mistake, I'm not advocating for languages to keep their purity. I think it's a good thing they mix and borrow concepts and words. But I do find the idea of having one world language an utter absurdity.

'Please don't insinuate that someone hasn't read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that."'

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Only if you stay in the same family. Going from C to C++, Java, or C# is pretty easy. Try going from C to Haskell or Clojure or Erlang.

You can play the same game with natural languages. It's easy to go between French, Italian, and Spanish. Try going from Icelandic to Mandarin.

By contrast, we can easily install the same version of a programming language interpreter/compiler and run-time onto countless machines and get the same behavior. The machines do not have to guess what the language is by forming hypotheses and testing them against more competent "speakers", to obtain either approval or correction. They just receive a ready-made software image.

In essence, a million installations of the same programming language are just manifestations of one image, whereas a million speakers of a language are individuals (not just as people, but as speakers of that language).

If people could receive a language as an image dumped into the brain, it would be a game-changer. It would still be a game changer even if it took five years to complete, rather than an hour. It would make fledgling languages more viable.

Because languages are hard to learn and even harder to learn very well, people tend not to be so interested in fledgling languages that can't be used outside of a small locale with a small number of speakers. Not as a second language, that's for sure.

I'm not comfortable with the idea that something which pops into my head today represents a burden for future generations to preserve, who will have perfectly good heads of their own into which similar stuff can pop just as well.

Linguists require specimens of languages to study so that we can understand language. But we have more than enough non-dying languages to keep linguists busy.

Our language has wisely sensed the two sides of being alone. It has created the word loneliness to express the pain of being alone. And it has created the word solitude to express the glory of being alone. - Paul Tillich

Dutch also has one word for happiness and luck ("geluk"), although in Flanders you can use "chance" to express "luck" specifically (borrowed from French).

In some ways, English allows for more specificity compared to German, but the reverse is also true.

As a native speaker of German I feel often more comfortable to advertise products in English but that is probably because I'm so used to English advertisements and I'm not so exposed to that particular vocabulary in German (or maybe German is too precise to really shine in advertisements). I don't think I could translate an Apple keynote into German and still sounding so 'magical'.

Maybe there are some words you can't translate literally or they don't sound as nice (contrarian: Querdenker, Nonkonformist) still you would miss other awesome things like the German way to combine nouns to infinite length.

Some of smsm42's example do have this property:

"Eigenwert" (eigenvalue): eigen (of (it)self), Wert (value)

"Weltschmerz": Welt (world), Schmerz (pain)

"Poltergeist": poltern (to rumble), Geist (ghost)

English prefers to borrow words from other languages. Curiously, it has borrowed hardly any words from Mandarin Chinese.

Besides that there had been much less contact between English speaking countries and China than to, say, German, French or Spanish speaking countries (at least until the Chinese economy began to boom) there is another reason that I can imagine. Since the Chinese dialects/languages are tonal languages their sound is much more foreign to the ear of people who didn't grew up with a tonal languages. Indeed people who learnt to speak one of the Chinese dialects told me one of the first exercises is learning to even consciously perceive the different tones.

Every child knows poltergeist, from Harry Potter. Every teenager knows angst.

The others are less universal, but I'd expect a university graduate to know them.

If only 321 people are left in the world speaking English, and billions speak Mandarin, absolutely!

It means that the world has basically said "to hell with English", and you're best off if you do too.

The practicalities of PLs aren't at all like spoken natural languages. For one thing, all computers can run any PL with little effort.

Secondly:

> Are you willing to stop speaking, reading, thinking, writing in English and use Mandarin?

What the OP thinks is irrelevant, it's whether this would be desirable or not. It would also not be a "do this now" thing and more of "in years to come, humanity will do this".

I think mankind will one day set foot on mars, and this effort will be a good thing - this does not mean I should be willing to be put on a rocket today.

But not with equal effort. Machines have been developed to run specific languages (Burroughs mainframes - Algol 60; Lisp Machines - Lisp), and languages have been developed to run on specific machines (C - PDP-11).

    For one thing, all computers can run any PL with little effort.

The clause "with little effort" is not counteracted though - for a computer this represents a short download-and-install of a compiler/interpreter.

Even writing a compiler may take the same amount of time it takes to learn a language from scratch.

The claim that different computer languages are easier to learn than different human languages betrays an incredible lack of perspective - 99% of humankind cannot manage even a single programming language while the majority worldwide are at least bilingual.