We went to go see the movie Arrival this weekend. It opened in the USA Wednesday night / Thursday.
For those unfamiliar, it's a new sci-fi movie about aliens visiting earth, but instead of being about Earth being attacked, it's about learning to communicate with them, teaching them about ourselves and finding out how to work together.
Google defines linguist as:
Google defines linguistics as:
the scientific study of language and its structure, including the study of morphology, syntax, phonetics, and semantics. Specific branches of linguistics include sociolinguistics, dialectology, psycholinguistics, computational linguistics, historical-comparative linguistics, and applied linguistics.
Programming languages could absolutely be considered foreign languages. As many languages are based on Latin, many programming languages are based on English or based on each other (C, C+, C++, VC++, C#, etc...)
In the movie, the linguist tries to teach the aliens English and in turn, they try to teach her their language. We as programmers, try to teach machines how to do something. We often don't get a response other then error messages (that we wrote in the first place) but we do get a predictable (usually, hah) response that we can then interpret ourselves.
We write books about our programming languages; we try to teach people about our programming languages; some languages get used left often; some die with old hardware or out of lack of need; not everyone knows all of the languages (as few know all spoken languages). Although not very efficient, you can speak in programming languages.
So, are programmers linguists? Or is there a need to make a distinction between programmer and linguist?
I suppose it comes down to the fact that programming languages are formal, whereas linguistics is, implicitly, about natural languages. I'm ok with the distinction, really.
And yeah, that movie is pretty good.
TheSheriff
Co-Founder, Founder, Entrepreneur & Problem Solver
Can't wait to see that movie - your rating?
On some level yes. I always joke that when someone asks me how many languages do I speak I always respond "define a language, because if it includes programming I speak more than you do."
It could be said that in order to require a language, for programming, computers are required. However, the same could be said generally, but with the need for people. So in it's base form if you consider a language to be defined as a method of sending, receiving and understanding signalling between two entities - then yes programmers are a niche of linguists.
I'd also potentially do a poll of this.