> And here’s why I don’t think the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis fully applies to programming languages. When we program we categorize the world in English (or Spanish, or any other natural language), and then we encode that into a program.

I'm not sure I do that. I'm often "thinking" about code by stubbing out functions or classes. I definitely don't translate algorithms I'm familiar with from English, I just write them directly.

But say that's how we do work. What happens next? Someone else looks for a bug. Or someone else adds a feature. Maybe you refactor.

A real software project is a team effort that requires countless interactions between authors over time.

The structure of the programming language dramatically influences the development of a large scale project. There are selective pressures all the time, you can rarely put into words why certain things are "idiomatic" to a language, but when a particular expression is confusing or odd, someone is likely to clean it up before long.

So, yes, programming languages are absolutely languages.