On 2012-05-14, at 02:00, Aristotle Pagaltzis wrote:
* Peter da Silva <pe...@taronga.com> [2012-05-14 02:45]:
* Imagining that there's some relationship between computer languages
and human languages.
* See COBOL
* See Perl
* Imagining that there's no relationship between computer languages and
linguistic cognition.
Not nearly as much as people think, and no more than between human languages
and mathematical notation. Less so, in some ways.
* Mathematical notation is ideal for programming!
This has nothing to do with the notation. Perl uses maths-like notation but it's still a horrible
example of this kind of confusion. There is a "linguistic structure" to mathematics as
well... and some of that "linguistic structure" is similarly inappropriate for
programming languages.
The only reason to design a programming language is so humans can read
it, after all the computer is just as happy to run machine code written
by humans manually as machine code written by a compiler.
s/read/write and understand/
It still has to express operations that will be run by a computer, and throwing
in linguistic fluff that makes it harder for humans to understand what's going
on (COBOL, Perl) isn't helping anywhere.
