this post was submitted on 28 Jun 2023
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Also both for me ! (even subscribed to programmer_humor and also linguistics_humor here on Lemmy)
Story time:
When I was at school, I hated languages (as a native French, English was a PAIN for me), but already was programming for fun outside school. Since I finished school, I grown interest in linguistics as well. I think for me it's more because manga and animes, and because I am curious, so I wanted to understand all the little parts in texts... So I learned Japanse, then improved my English... then went curious about chinese... Spanish... And at this point, I don't even learn new languages (too much time), I only searched for differences, construction and all; and that is where I discovered Linguistics basically.
Difference between human & computer language:
I heard that part of the brain that process Human language and Computer language is the same, that may be the reason, idk
They seems to be really different though, you don't "Speak" or write a computer program like you write a text or a poem, it's a totally different thinking process. The same way, you never read code from top to bottom left to right (reason why unindented code is AWFUL to read), it's more about looking around what's going on, to understand what the whole is doing. Sentences are way less dependent on the context (and WAYYYYY less dependent on what follows) to understand them.
But in a way, with time, we lean patterns, and know to recognize them (both in human and computer language), that may be the reason why they are both on the same part of the brain
I think in code, and compose most of my projects in my head before I lay hands on a keyboard. It's weird to most people when I describe it, but to me it feels like an expression, and it needs to get out, like some might write a poem that comes to them maybe. But don't expect me to learn a human language, I will struggle.
For one, you're using a complex system of communication, where the meaning of each unit meaning changes, depending on context and the agreement between speaker and hearer. The system is used for phatic, performatic, epistemic, deontic statements, plus more; and it's usually tied into utterances and discourse in a higher level. And it's such a mess that would make any spaghetti code look cleaner in comparison.
For the other, you're delivering a set of instructions. It behaves far more like maths over strictly performative statements than like the above. If you say x = 1, then x is 1. And if you ask if x == 1, you'll get a true/false output, not any sort of implicature or "it depends on context".