I’ve observed a connection between lovers of computer languages, and lovers of human languages.
If you are interested in coding or linguistics, are you interested in both or just one of of the two? If only one interests you, which one and why? If both interest you, do they seem related to one another?
I code in a few languages and I’ve always wanted to know more than one “human” language but efforts in that area have more or less consistently failed (exception being Esperanto because that’s easy, but since hardly anyone speaks it it’s not exactly useful).
Despite my interest in both I doubt there’s much of a correlation when you look at programmers (or polyglots) as a group, though. For all we call all of these things “languages” there’s a pretty big distinction and difference in complexity and approach between the computer and human ones, it’s a whole different hobby.
I’d compare coding more to other hobbies that involve making things. I knit a jumper, I develop a video game…scratches same itch.
Or possibly problem-solving hobbies. I work out how to adjust a sewing pattern to fit, I solve a tricksy sudoku…again same itch.
I myself am interested in both, I decided to specialize in programming, but did take a linguistics class back in highschool, in the class we constructed a fantasy language, and i still wave and occasionally update the documentation.
Coding languages and constructed human languages are bothan designed system of communication, its just that the targets are different. Coding languages (usually) unambiguously define a means of communicating structure and function, whereas human languages elvolve or are designed to communicate experience, something a lot more … nebulous.
I’m interested in programming language theory but not as much in linguistics. There is some interesting overlap though. I think I like PLT because it is prescriptive, unambiguous and clear; whereas linguistics is an attempt to describe natural language, but has areas that are ambiguous and less clear (invisible green dragons sleep furiously, for one). This impedence mismatch is probably why natural language processing is such a difficult problem in computer science and why we tend to rely on AI for it.
Chomsky’s work in linguistics and grammars was incredibly important for computational parsing, be it source code or anything else. The Chomsky hierarchy (depicted and linked below) is important for developers writing parsers to know, because each category of grammar has different performance characteristics.
