I don't know, have there really been meaningful "language barriers" between mainstream programming languages for the last 20 years or so? If I think about the

I don't know, have there really been meaningful "language barriers" between mainstream programming languages for the last 20 years or so? If I think about the 10 most common languages being used for application code right now, something like 80% of them can be described as "C or ALGOL's syntax with call-by-reference and automatic memory management". If you program for a living, I feel like you can switch between any of these without much effort. They're so similar to one another at a fundamental level, and there's lots of convergence going on as they adopt features from one another. Sure, doing C or C++ for the first time can be hard if you've never had to think about memory lifecycles before, but even that isn't so crazy if you're working with established patterns, pay attention to warnings, and use an aggressive linter. For languages with actual learning curves, they're just not as widely used (e.g. Rust, Ada SPARK, lisp, forth, ML).