... yeah no those are nothing alike at all...
I don't think it's fair to say that approaching a foreign language has nothing to do with approaching a new programming language.
I should have specified it was learning Koine Greek that helped (Latin was somewhat of a bridge that made it less painful, because Latin also relies heavily on declension/conjugation instead of straight word order). Koine Greek is wildly different than English. I think it would be the difference between something like going from an OOP language to something like Prolog.
I am trilingual, but I have never found anything in natural languages to be useful for programming (well, apart from knowing English because most of the software is written in it). Moreover - learning syntax of a programming language is the easiest part.
The hardest part for natural languages are your vocab/familiarity with the culture, and the hardest part of programming languages is your familiarity with the ecosystem/libraries.
There have been studies that show children with a bilingual upbringing tend to score higher in school.
So it might indirectly help with programming, or at least help with learning to program.
I think it did help a bit because it made me think about the syntactic structure intellectually, where my native tounge the syntax comes intuitively.
Not saying it magically made me a super programmer or anything, but i feel like it certainly didnt hurt my programming skill.