Our company recently started using alternative domain handles such as .nu, .es, .se and so on in response to one of my rants. It is the interests behind legislation that continue to halt innovation. We could evolve much faster if we had brighter minds leading our country. In the meantime we decided to contribute by not using .com domains.
I'm quadrilingual and recently I had an interesting discussion with a friend of mine about other types of languages such as programming languages. I do think that these count as a form of expression and ultimately improve the brain's executive function as the article states. Furthermore, they develop critical and logic thinking.
I'm currently in a business program, but I'm fluent with several programming languages. I can't be sure that programming languages are the reason, but I feel a lot of people around me lack the logical thought process.
Many of them seem to lack the ability to think recursively, and I find myself having to draw flowcharts, even to explain the most basic if-else thought processes.
In human languages, I'm strictly monolingual, but I have retained enough French that I can read (easy) French articles, some Spanish writing, and some Italian writing. I recently went to the Dominican Republic and did OK with the Spanish that I had to use there (which, granted, was minimal); a longer trip to Italy required more knowledge of Italian, but I picked up enough to be able to order dinner and ask directions while there.
On the programming language side, however, I've learned ~25 programming languages and dialects (ksh, bash, and zsh are IMO dialects of sh) and probably use ~6 of them regularly. I suspect that your intuition about how programming languages can affect people this way is correct, but because (as radicalbyte said http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3720212) programming languages have simpler grammars, one need be fluent in more than one programming language to get the benefit of being human-language multilingual.
I do know that knowing more programming languages has made me a better programmer—I can think about the problems that I solve differently, and can adapt the idioms from one language (such as an Enumerable#any? from Ruby) to another language (implementing something similar for anonymous delegates in C#). I've also found that, by and large, I learn new programming languages and idioms faster now than when I first started and only knew a couple of languages.
This is something that needs to happen. I wish ProFounder hadn't close, however it's a clear example of how our institutions and legal frameworks are not evolving fast enough to foster creativity and innovation. I'm still waiting for Government 2.0...
This definitely blurs the line between calling an app native or web based, at least from a business-marketing standpoint. However, far more interesting is to see the waves of innovation that APIs have created. APIs are becoming the personality of computer systems in the sense that they allow interaction and shielding from the outside world. As long as developers know how to interact with a system's personality they can now build just about anything. Furthermore, experience is becoming the new IP so I believe that such technologies will bring more and more experience innovation by providing easier and faster paths for high-level programmers to contribute to the ecosystem.
I don't believe it's one or the other but rather both being part of the cycle that enables us to transform our reality.