The funny thing is that for me it IS a switch. About a year ago I travelled to Ireland and England on vacation. While I did mostly general touristic stuff, I a

The funny thing is that for me it IS a switch. About a year ago I travelled to Ireland and England on vacation. While I did mostly general touristic stuff, I added some geeky points of interest to my itinerary such as Bletchley Park, Alexander Fleming's lab and planned to attend a StackOverflow conference. Meeting fellow programmers is always fun. Now, I'm an Hebrew speaker, but speak English fairly well. After about 3 to 4 days I made the "switch" and generally thought in English and spoke pretty fluently. Towards the end of the trip (after about 20 days) I went to the StackOverflow conference, where I saw two of my programming idols, Jeff and Joel. At some point at the conference I approached the couple and we started to chat. Now, I hate to admit this, but bear in mind I was as ecstatic as a little girl meeting Justin Bieber in person. I was about 22 at the time and liked a lot of what they wrote on their blogs. I know that generally people feel pressured when being treated as "idols" and these days I'm much better about these things, but at the time I couldn't help myself. All of this lead to me "forgetting" some of the English and (what I felt was) a much less fluent conversation, on my part. To make things more ironic Joel tried some Hebrew with me and I insisted to speak in English (which was a bit broken due to anxiety). After 20 days in English speaking countries it just felt too awkward for me to speak in Hebrew. Maybe it was awkward for me to speak in a language foreign to the rest of the group or just the anxiety that kicked in and I'm making too much of it. I don't know. Why ironic? Here I was, a native Hebrew speaker from Israel, unable to speak in my native tongue while a former Israeli, practically his entire life living in the states, tries to speak with me in Hebrew and unable to. I'm not sure if it's a matter of plain capability. When thinking about programming I can think simultaneously about how to express an idea in different programming languages/paradigms. This is another point of interest, how is thinking in other languages compares to thinking in different programming languages. tl;dr: It seems to me there is more to the switching metaphor than developed in the article. When getting into the flow of a language it may be harder to operate in a different one. Moreover, as programmers we are all too familiar with thinking in different programming languages and it's interesting to see how it all relates.