Person A: "Learning X is a poor use of time for almost everyone. Here are some numbers." Person B: "And yet some people learn X! And X is superficially similar

Person A: "Learning X is a poor use of time for almost everyone. Here are some numbers." Person B: "And yet some people learn X! And X is superficially similar to Y, which tons of people do with much less time investment for much more money! Checkmate!" I have no idea what your actual argument here is. This follow up isn't doing any favors. --- My experience is that you reach "fluency" in your first programming language in about an order of magnitude less time than you can any human language. Python took me about a summer of teenage study at about 2 hours a day to feel comfortable with. Most further programming languages took an order of magnitude time less than that. Human languages by contrast demand no less from the vast majority of people than 1000 hours of practice in the easiest cases for one to feel comfortable with them. There is a reason you can major in Swedish at Harvard but not Python. It is the same reason you can graduate having majored in Swedish at Harvard without actually being fluent in Swedish. It's the same reason. 1000 hours is a long time, and that is as easy as it gets. You are drawing a strange and false equivalence between these two things, and I'm just not really sure what your point is. If your point is "these are secretly the same activity", my strongest response is "quantity has a quality all its own".