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Comment by rossdavidh

3 years ago

It's a bit tricky to say what the "Sapir-Whorf hypothesis" predicts, since apparently neither Sapir nor Whorf exactly formulated a clearly stated hypothesis on this topic. This means people write about "strong" or "weak" versions of it.

I think, to use your analogy, any language that lets you write new libraries which can be imported, will tend to become pretty decent at anything which people programming in that language do a lot. Whatever problems there are in the language itself, tend to become ameliorated (though probably not entirely eliminated) by focused work, for example spinning up a neural net or scraping a website gets much easier once a lot of people have done it in your language of choice, and they have released a library that they use to do it.

So, a language may not be good for speaking about a topic which the speakers of that language don't have much experience with, but if they come to have much experience with it, the language will quickly evolve to get better at it.