Up until recently, c. 90s, Whorf was often derided (and ridiculed) in most linguistic circles as being an amateur or worse, a nut job (he was a chemical engineer by profession), e.g. see Pinker's The Language Instinct. This was because of the prevalence of universal grammar idea of the Chomsky school, that held sway in Linguistics, especially in the US. Only recently researchers have started to revisit the idea thoroughly and gave it its due merit (for an early, ~mid 80s, and influential debate on the subject, read this paper about the debate between Bloom and Au about whether the lack of counterfactuals in Chinese hampers their analysis of complex counterfactual sentences http://groups.psych.northwestern.edu/gentner/papers/YehGentn...).
People resist the Whorf hypothesis from a purely political grounds, too, thinking that accepting it would lead to cultural relativism.
That being said, although the idea seems intuitively correct, there are difficulties when you start to think more. The analogy with programming languages goes only so far, there you are trying to translate a task, described in your native language, e.g. language, into a programming language. If language limits thought, the expressions of thought should be done (partly) in a non-linguistic and more rich way. Not very many linguistics, cognitive scientists, or philosophers would take this view, I think, but there are some who do, e.g. Fodor, who proposes that thought are expressed in a "language of thought" distinct from native language.
This is a fascinating subject, if you have a few hours (or days) to sink, check out the Language of Thought entry of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/language-thought/