Agree on the cage-match idea. That would be absurd.<p>But in the not-so-distant future, perhaps effectively communicating with devices might turn out to be a far more valuable skill to have than doing so with humans.<p>And natural languages are not similar. Knowing languages in which more books and articles are published is going to be more valuable than ones in which there aren&#x27;t that many.<p>Of course writing code requires different &#x27;skills&#x27; than writing articles but looking at this from a standpoint of employability knowing certain (natural) languages makes someone a better candidate than others. Similarly knowing certain programming languages&#x2F;platforms might someone more employable too. It&#x27;s unlikely that someone knows no natural languages and exclusively knows programming languages.<p>With this background, an interesting question is how does  someone who knows (say) C++, Python and Russian weigh against someone who knows (say) English and Java!