I'm also intrigued by this. One of the responses below mentioned how other industries do similar things. Now let me give you my perspective. I have been semi-te

I'm also intrigued by this. One of the responses below mentioned how other industries do similar things. Now let me give you my perspective. I have been semi-technical for many years but my background is rather bookish: translation and publishing. More recently I've been working as a technical translator at software company. Even though I had tried to learn php at some time, I didn't make much progress. But now, I finally understood programming and learnt python. Let me tell you something: it took my work to the next level. For a professional programmer, what I do might seem easy, but learning python has had a real impact in the way I work. I can now, for example, do things like extraction of common words, BUT filtered through a word stoplist and a spell-checking library. Proof-reading is super fast now. I can get all adjectives from a text. And each day I learn more. I want to become a computational linguist, so I can offer new, different services (I feel I MUST to this, specially facing advances in machine translation). But I don't think all people must have the same orientation, so I don't know if I should say "all translators should learn python". It works for me, but maybe not for other translators, for example, literary translators.