having spent ½ of my career converting japanese to english and the other ½ converting english requirements into javascript, i have a theory.
being bilingual in natural languages makes learning programming languages easier.
the farther apart the languages that you learn, the more you learn about language itself, since there's so much more to reconcile.
learning programming languages is really just the same thing, except that the speakers you communicate with are REALLY, REALLY unforgiving.
so the skills of a good programmer are the same as those of a good translator:
the ability to model the audience's internal state, and
the ability to create the most concise language needed to mutate it.