On Programming Languages as Languages (2014)
4 points by rbr
4 points by rbr
I like the overall point of the article, though I have a hard time thinking of programming languages as languages, considering that most of them use English vocabulary. Perhaps in those cases, they would be closer to sociolects of English.
In sociolinguistics, a sociolect is a form of language (non-standard dialect, restricted register) or a set of lexical items used by a socioeconomic class, profession, age group, or other social group.
(Emphasis mine)
I have wondered what a programming language could be like, if tmore like a human language, where you can e.g. use inflection to express intent. Maybe accusative would be needed to mutate an object, or grammatical number could be used to express sets of objects, or word order could be free(r) without ambiguity if it leans synthetic rather than analytic, etc.
Making inflections meaningful sounds intruiging. I'm afraid it will be a nightmare to parse, though. Or if it is parseable, I expect it will be too rigid to feel natural.
Yes I agree, but it sure would be interesting.
Perhaps English is a good substrate for programming languages precisely because it has lost most of its synthetic features, so it rarely feels terribly wrong when you can't inflect at all.
Toki Pona should work well too, then.