Re:The danger of "language" in programming (2009)
by mjp94 on Friday December 27, 2013 @12:26PM
(#6971561)
The comparison made between English and C++ (spoken/written language and programming language) makes me wonder if people should even be comparing the two at at all. They do serve similar purposes in a sense, but what I'm wondering is if we would even compare them if they both weren't called "languages"? If the words used for programming language and written/spoken languages were completely disjoint, would this point even be brought up?
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Re:The danger of "language" in programming (2009)
by gsg on Friday December 27, 2013 @01:19PM
(#6971816)
"It's possible to program a computer in English. It's also possible to make an airplane controlled by reins and spurs." - John McCarthy.
Re:The danger of "language" in programming (2009)
by Fargren on Friday December 27, 2013 @12:43PM
(#6971636)
Language Theory is a subset of automata theory that covers both. So at least in some sense, they are comparable. We can place them in Chomsky's Hierarchy and compare the constructs that are meaningful in both.
Re:The danger of "language" in programming (2009)
by agentultra on Friday December 27, 2013 @01:26PM
(#6971859)
They share the same node, language, so I don't see they could avoid comparison. In fact, programming language could be argued to be a specialization of spoken language. After all we're not punching in bytes by hand on control cards anymore.
Re:The danger of "language" in programming (2009)
by hercynium on Friday December 27, 2013 @02:07PM
(#6972082)
Indeed, the blurring of this distinction became the means by which Larry Wall earned his college degree!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Wall#Education
He talks about it in more depth in this interview: http://youtu.be/aNAtbYSxzuA