As a programmer, what's the most valuable non-English (human) language to learn?
- by Andrew M
I was thinking that with my developer skills, learning new languages like French, German etc. might be easier for me now. I could setup the verbs as objects in Python and use dir(verb) to find its methods, tenses and stuff ;-)
But seriously, if you're a professional developer, in my case in the UK, what's the best foreign language to learn from an employment perspective? I'm thinking, like
Hindi - if all our programming jobs are getting outsourced to India, might as well position yourself to be the on-site, go-between guy.
Mandarin - if the Chinese become the pre-eminent economy, the new USA, in ten or twenty years, then speaking their language would open up a huge market to you.
Russian - maybe another major up-and-comer, but already closer to Western standards. More IT-sector growth here than anywhere else in the coming years?
Japanese - drivers of global technology, being able to speak their language could give you a big competitive advantage over other Westerners
But I'm just guessing/musing with all these points. If you have an opinion, or even better, some evidence, I'd like to hear it. If the programming things falls through then at least it'll make for more interesting holidays.
