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I've always considered programming languages to be languages to communicate amongst humans (the computer doesn't care one bit what language it has to parse or interpret).
I was looking for material related to studying programming languages as natural languages, but couldn't find much besides people strongly arguing that programming languages are geared towards the computer and not humans.
Any less narrow-minded views out there?
#linguistics #programmingLanguages #languageDesign #programming
Vegard Nossum
@mnl Check out Larry Wall, creator of Perl. From Wikipedia:
"""Wall's training as a linguist is apparent in his books, interviews, and lectures. He often compares Perl to a natural language and explains his decisions in Perl's design with linguistic rationale. He also often uses linguistic terms for Perl language constructs, so instead of traditional terms such as "variable", "function", and "accessor" he sometimes says "noun", "verb", and "topicalizer"."""
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@vegard oh that's cool, thank you! I have my personal history with perl, but I agree that it is one of the languages that does follow a different "concept" of what a language should be, for better or for worse. It was so ahead with CPAN and the structuring of packages, which for me is part of a communication culture informed by the language and its intent itself.
Nathan Gray
@mnl I remember a quote, maybe from Knuth? Paraphrased: “A programming language is a way for one human to tell another human what a computer should do.”
Cypherfox
@jvschrag @mnl Huh; the obvious extension is that our computer languages are also based on scaffolded metaphors, starting with the memory and register oriented instructions and stacking abstraction layers on top. LLMs can be another layer.
I’ve always treated programming as a language problem and it always frustrated me that CS was tightly tied to Math in schools.
And…just to say: double major in linguistics and CS…! ? That would have been my dream in college. Nice! ?
John Schrag
@mnl The idea is that our language is based on really concrete ideas -- our bodies, how they move, the space around us, etc -- used as metaphors to communicate more abstract ideas, which are then used to make more, eventually filling out an entire language.
The book I read was "Metaphors We Live By" by Lakoff and Johnson. (I had used some of Lakoff's textbooks in university linguistics). I think the book made its argument very well, but it was very dry to read. (Interesting, but not fun)
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@jvschrag what does "scaffolded metaphors" mean in this context? Can I read up more on this?
John Schrag
@mnl My undergraduate degree is in Linguistics and computer science. (Double major). I think you are correct — programming languages are there to make things easier for humans to read and share code. Natural human languages are unsuitable for programming use because they are by nature ambiguous. This is a feature and not a bug in human-human communication. (Some linguists argue that all human cognition derives from scaffolded metaphors).
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