The speaker is Engineering Manager at
Digital Ocean and also an Organizer of
EmpireJS.
The hypothesis of
linguistic relativity (aka. Sapir–Whorf hypothesis) says that the languages we speak influence the way we think.
I argue this applies to programming languages too.
However, key differences between spoken languages and programming languages enable us to adapt and shift our ways of thinking more fluidly as we learn programming languages than as we learn spoken languages.
We can and should leverage these differences to grow individually as programmers and further advance our favorite programming languages.