Well, the ability to communicate with others. Transferring and receiving the state of our mind and emotions to others. It's fundamentally deeper and hairier than the things we program.

I suppose you can learn a language without ever interacting with others. I thought I could learn Spanish that way, the same way I learned to program.

Eventually I could read in Spanish yet was hard pressed to utter a sentence. And when I interacted with people who could speak Spanish, it was just depressing and shameful. Learning a language just to be able to read some more books and watch some movies turns out to be pretty dull.

As an introvert, this was part of the journey that made me truly appreciate human interaction and question how much time we spend caring about programming and tech. Kind of like how I cared about things when I was younger and have started caring about people as I get older.

Of course, my whole top level comment is a complete derailing of the discussion around the article and just an unsolicited meandering on my part. I don't think there's much analysis to be had in my post. I just immediately though of my younger self and anyone I've ever heard trying to compare programming to communicating with other humans in their native tongue.

> Well, the ability to communicate with others. Transferring and receiving the state of our mind and emotions to others.

But again, why does this require speech? There's sign language. There's braille. Are neither of these languages?

What I'm trying to say is that this isn't really a simple question. We've clearly thrown out the dictionary definition of a language, but these restrictions seem arbitrarily created to disclude programming languages but the way they're done also disclude things we do consider languages. Verbal communication seems like a strange restriction.