There's no way this is true. I cut my teeth on Microsoft QuickBasic, and I promise you that QuickBasic has been far from my mind for many years. At this point, I've written programs in about 50 different languages (not all of them professionally): procedural, object-oriented, applicative, concatenative, relational; different paradigms require different "modes of reasoning" to properly wield.
To extend your translation analogy, it's rather like learning a natural language in that at first you might think in your native tongue and translate on-the-fly, but to become fluent you must really internalize the new language and learn to "switch" your thoughts into it. I feel like the linguistic concepts of "registers" and "code switching" apply well to formal languages as well as natural ones.
To extend your translation analogy, it's rather like learning a natural language in that at first you might think in your native tongue and translate on-the-fly, but to become fluent you must really internalize the new language and learn to "switch" your thoughts into it. I feel like the linguistic concepts of "registers" and "code switching" apply well to formal languages as well as natural ones.