As a fellow scientist (now retired) I'm glad to find and follow you on Medium. A lot of what you said chimed with me - the joys of learning to speak different languages, even though I've never learnt as much as I wanted to. England is the *worst* place to grow up if you want to be multilingual. Also the joys and creativity of software development, even though that's a field that has got a bit beyond me now. I used to teach Ada to aerospace engineers (that was a long time ago). Thanks for an interesting post.