I'm not ignoring you so much as trying to figure out where to start. I'm usually in general agreement with yous, yet I find every point of that post to be wrong. Hanker's endorsement notwithstanding.

Perhaps we just understand the word "language" differently, because I think of most of the things you declare to not be language, are in fact, language.

As a codemonkey you'd naturally expect me to focus on "computer code". All computer "code"--if you mean "source code" and not the binary output of a compiler--is expressed in a computer language. Among the formal definitions of "language" is "(5) : a formal system of signs and symbols (as FORTRAN or a calculus in logic) including rules for the formation and transformation of admissible expressions (6) : machine language" (Merriam-Webster). (Even your Fortran is there...I wondered for a moment if there was something about it that led you to think of it as not language, but even Fortran is expressive enough to seem recognizably a language, I think.)

Music is not a language? Facial expressions and gestures? (You, a Latin man, would deny gestures are a language?) Does my lifted eyebrow and mocking grin, if you could but see it, communicate nothing?

Prime metaphor of our age or not, I must dispute what seems to be one of your key points, that language is software. It most definitely is not. It is an expression of an idea (broken down into instructions to manifest the programmer's idea), an idea expressed in language. You can't create software without language, but the result isn't (usually) language (except in the narrow case of writing a new language in an old one).

And speaking of which, "People don’t invent languages"? Even allowing for the arbitrary exclusion of created computer languages, I'm sure you've heard of Esperanto, and it's not the only invented language. Must I bring up Klingon? Must I?

I don't disagree with everything. Certainly language and our mental architectures are intimately connected, and language conditions the thoughts we can think...yet it's an interactive process, because we constantly extend language as we learn to think new thoughts. (To be clear, grammar and syntax seem to evolve, though at a slower pace than vocabulary expands. I'm not talking about quantity of words here...for example there's a distinctly new language evolving on commercial Web sites, "clickwriting", a language refined to promote the particular behavior of clicking on links. DanS has posted some examples on OpToffy.)

If AI ultimately bears fruit, defined as artificial consciousness, it's intriguing to wonder what thoughts these constructs can think. Would an AI coded mostly in C think Kernaghan-Ritchie style, thoughts bracketed into neat blocks and nicely functionally-decomposed? Would Fortran-based AIs be good at science, while COBOL-based AIs make good accountants? Let's try not to think about LISP-based AI.

But having achieved consciousness, these AIs would immediately begin evolving their own languages, used internally to think and to communicate with each other. And like humans I'd expect them to evolve their languages as their mental capacities grow. It's likely that no human could ever "get inside the mind" of an AI, lacking a capacity for highly-evolved machine language. Yet AIs, having been created by languages that sprang from the human mental architecture, will probably have little trouble understanding us.

There's a new field of academic study called "existential risk", and in addition to things like meteor strikes, they think a lot about the potential consequences of AI. It's a serious thing any more, no longer a crackpot paranoia. The idea of living alongside beings able to see inside our heads, yet whose thoughts are opaque to us, can be a bit frightening.

Makes me sympathize a little bit with the conservative reaction to attempts to understand the "psychology of conservatism". Understanding not being their strong suit, they must feel terribly disadvantaged and vulnerable, which feeds into the native paranoia. Nyah ha ha ha! [Communicates in the language of villainy by twirling mustache.]

OK, feeling less neglected?