Languages

LOL! Reminds me of when I tried to take the humanities course in logic, and was denied, because I had already taken the engineering course by the same name. Like being able to minimize Karnaugh maps had anything to do with arguing…

If you learn a foreign language you can be reasonably sure that in 30 years people will still be speaking it. Not so with programming; it’s a constant struggle to keep up with the latest ‘cool’ language.

I think it’s an archaic conflation that may have made some sense at one time but no longer does. I was applying for graduate programs in the late 70’s and they generally required a foreign or programming language as a graduation requirement. Hard as it may be for youngsters to appreciate, computers were still new – I had never touched one even though I was wrapping up my second bachelors degree. Colleges were desperately trying to encourage students to use the damned things – especially those of us in the liberal arts who at the time tended to be somewhat skeptical of their utility. Giving the choice then may have been a good way to get people to utilize the power of computers. I think that battle is over – no one needs to be encouraged to use computers today. The opposite is probably true – people need to be taught how to conduct basic research off-line.

Analogies can be made with the romance languages (with their Latin roots) and various computer languages that borrow or extend idioms from C, perhaps the closest thing we have to a mother tongue in computing (if you are conversant with C’s idioms, most other modern languages are a snap to pick up).

But where human languages evolve and allow for new idioms, human/machine interaction is not quite so flexible. How often do your listeners or readers throw up their hands when you leave off a semicolon or reference a term you haven’t explicitly defined earlier?

I doubt there is a lot of cross-benefit to this, other than to assume that someone who learns either sort of language for their own benefit is probably pretty bright in the head.

Learning a programming language is more like learning to use statistical methods. You learn a new approach to solving certain classes of problems. Whether you are proficient enough to do so on your own or whether you leave the implementation to a specialist is not as important as knowing what techniques are best suited to a given problem you are trying to solve.

In many philosophy grad programs, a programming language will substitute for the language requirement. I don’t think that this is because anyone thinks the two are interchangeable, however. Most programs will also accept a “special skill” in lieu of the language exam. For students doing philophy of law, for example, this might mean taking some courses in law or even just having a law degree prior to entering the philosophy program.

In short, it’s an incremental way of eliminating the language requirement; it’s still on the books, but almost no one is satisfying it with a language.

Cian, OK, so first there was a family of ALGOL-style procedural languages – don’t you agree that they are all pretty much the same? And there there was this object-oriented reformation and what came out of it is all very similar too. So, yes, you need to understand two concepts, both relatively simple.

It probably depends on univ/program but I know that a lot of econ depts get annoyed when the college insist that their grad applicants have had taken a foreign language when many of them come from technical backgrounds (or other countries) where a foreign language was not a requisite at the undergrad level. So equating foreign lang = prog. lang is a way around this annoying bureaucratic requirement. In some schools – Rochester I believe – you could get foreign lang credit for straight up math courses.

By the way, I recommend people read a masterpiece of the software-as-speech genre, James S. Tyre’s

“Programmers’ & Academics’ Amici Brief in NY MPAA DeCSS Case”

It includes a great footnote:

“If “$plain_text = $file_key ^ $xor_block” seems unapproachable, consider what those not trained in the language of legal citation would make of “111 F.Supp.2d 294, 326 (S.D.N.Y. 2000).” Each is meaningless to those unfamiliar with the language; but each is more precise and compact for those who do understand than would be an English narrative equivalent.”

(Disclaimer: I contributed to this, so I’m very self-interested)

I agree that human languages and computer languages are very different things. (Although there are enough interesting similarities, at levels like syntactic description, that the metaphor of “language” isn’t completely nonsensical. It’s not accidental that Chomsky is cited in both linguistics textbooks and computer science textbooks.) I also agree with two of the important differences people have pointed out above: the connection of human languages to cultures and bodies of literature, and the fact that learning a computer language well takes less than a year.

I disagree with the idea that all computer languages are essentially the same, however. It may seem that way if you’ve only learned a few languages, because it’s likely that the first few languages you’ve learned are pretty similar. (True for me, anyway. The first languages I used were Focal, BASIC, Fortran, and Pascal, which aren’t all that different from each other.)

But there is a fair amount of variation out there. Programs written in Scheme or Haskell or ML or Prolog or Newsqueak look very different, even at the algorithmic level, from programs written in Smalltalk or C++ or Algol.

I thought the important thing with learning a computer language was not the syntax or the “grammar”, but the particular methods for writing programs effectively – methods like modularisation, debugging, commenting, proper type-declaration – which are pretty much independent of the language itself. In fact people who learn “programming” first through languages like R or the proprietary methods of Stata, SAS etc. aren’t really learning to program at all – they’re learning to give a computer instructions.

(Would Noam Chomsky say this about learning human language? I don’t know anything about linguistics, so I wouldn’t know…).

But I agree that the difference between learning a computer language and a real language is so great as to be incomparable.

“Programs written in Scheme…look very different, even at the algorithmic level, from programs written in Smalltalk or C++ or Algol.”

Indeed, and R, deep down, has the structure of the (highly respected) Scheme language. I’ve been tempted to learn it for that reason alone.

فورتران is apparently Fortran in Arabic. Up to you to write it in Farsi

…or Haskell or…

C’mon, let’s talk about programing languages people actually use. This Haskell thing to computer languages is like those clicking languages spoken in South Africa to the foreign languages people typically trying to learn.

Of course the two are not interchangeable, but as far as learning them is concerned I think there are general similarities:

You can learn basic grammar and a few phrases in a foreign language within a month or so and you can learn the basics of a programming language in the same amount of time. Similarly you can read the manual of, say, a graphics program or read an introduction to Hegel in a relatively short amount of time and you’ll know where all the buttons are or you’ll be able to do some namedropping in casual conversation.

But that doesn’t mean you have much of a clue about what you are doing – all you know is how to follow certain rules or push certain buttons. If you’re actually asked to apply this knowledge, to do something more complex with it, you’ll probably be quite lost or at least very slow.

Also, a programmer with a bit of experience should be compared to a translator or linguist, rather than someone picking up his first foreign language.

Another dubious ‘language’ equivalence: When I was finishing my grad program (comp lit), there was a proposal to allow knowledge of musical notation to substitute for one of the foreign languages required for the degree. I imagine that reading/writing music is much closer to programming than to natural language, at least in terms of the corners of the brain each relies on.

Interesting points, all. A couple to add: First, as James Redfield taught me in first-year Greek, the thing about language is that you already know ninety percent of what is being said.* With human-human languages, no matter how different, there is a huge store of common knowledge: we can’t see things in the dark, if we walk into a restaurant we probably want food or drink, we hurt when injured, etc.
We don’t have that store of knowledge in common with machines, which makes the language-learning analogy more apt in some ways–the language is ‘more foreign’, in that you have to think in a very different way–but less apt in others–it’s less of a language.
Secondly, Eszter’s contention that “Foreign languages … allow us to get to know cultures, histories, peoples in a way that is very difficult to do through translation” seems to me suspect.** I’d argue that learning a language is fairly far down the road of cultural understanding; there’s way more that can be done first in one’s native tongue. But perhaps that because of my intellectual/analytical bent; others who do a better job absorbing information may have a better experience learning the language first.

Lastly, language requirements are present in academic programs for all sorts of different reasons. Undergrad programs may require one because they feel (liberal-artsily) that it’s a generically broadening experience or that it stretches one’s mind in useful ways. Or they may feel (econ/technically) that it’s an important skill to have in today’s working world. Grad programs may require a foreign language because it’s central to the object of study (e.g. history) or because so much important scholarship in a given field has been written in it (why classicists should know French and German), or, again, because it causes indirect reflection on one’s own language (English Ph.D. programs requiring a foreign language).

In some of these cases (engineers learning Cantonese to be able to communicate with suppliers overseas; archaeologists stumbling through excavation reports in German or Russian) a rough, mechanical translation will do; other cases (you can easily imagine them) will require a more feeling familiarity with the language and culture.

Perhaps this comes back to the 90% of what is already shared between the speaker/writer and reader/listener: the laws of physics and chemistry and principles of mechanical engineering, knowledge of stratigraphy and epigraphy and art-historical periodization and the like, or an already deep familiarity with the society under study, which one is attempting to further.

In fact, perhaps we should flip Redfield’s dictum on its head, and say that the receiver of a message can only learn new information in a 1/9 proportion to the amount of information in a message that s/he already shares with the sender. If you have a lot of information in common, you can get the whole new 10% that’s being sent. If you have only a little bit in common, you’re only going to get a littler bit of new information.

*If this wasn’t a Redfield original, the cite would be appreciated!

**Yes, I’ve elided “time spent in other countries,” which I find harder to argue with.

That’s funny, michael, I would assume that music is much more like natural language than like programming — largely because it is dependent on a human interpreter for its expressiveness and meaning (possibly ‘meaning’). MIDI is a programming language, or fraction thereof.

Again, any programmer can learn a new language badly, hammering it into the idiom of the one they like the way a hopeful tourist uses a phrasebook. This code rarely runs well, even though it’s being interpreted by deterministic machines… something that people who are good at the subtleties and reinterpretation of human interaction often forget is that the material world is also subtle, and while never contrary, never helpful. *Because* humans imply and interpret and assume, we are bad at explaining what we want done without assumptions.

So I don’t think machine and human languages are the same thing at all, for interacting with anything outside oneself. The only similarity I see is in the effect of learning a new language or ‘language’ on one’s own habits of thought. Maybe those are as similar in reality as they feel to me (and learning a new instrument, or even a new dance idiom, is surprisingly close too).

kristina b, in similar situations I have started by telling the non-techies that computers are only really good at doing the boring work. It was, among other things, a try for humanitarian business processes; offload the dull and repetitive, respect everything that took judgement. (And log the hell out of the judgement calls, to analyze them for efficiency and bias!)

An interesting blend between a programming language an a real language is the ‘pseudo-code’ style used to describe algorithms in books and papers.

This usually looks like a generic ALGOL-type language, with DO loops and IF ELSE ENDIF blocks, but critical parts are described only in words, and things like variable initialization and exception handling are not written down, but it is assumed that the reader will understand they are needed.

So it has the structure and vocabulary of a programming language, but its sole purpose is to communicate between humans. As a result, it can have the ambiguties and assumption that normally are so typical of real languages.

hp @ 4: This particular small-minded hobgoblin (2nd Dan blackbelt in copyediting) finds it necessary to point out that “Unix” is to be written all in caps if and only if one is referring to the trademark owned by the Open Systems Group. The original operating system, developed by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, and collaborators at Bell Laboratories, was known as Unix.

This results in distinctions between, e.g., “Version 7 Unix” and “UNIX® System V.”

julian@18: Basic, Pascal, C++ are languages only in the most attenuated sense of the word. They don’t permit anything but commands and instructions.

But perl permits poetry!

Matthew Kuzma, if you are interested in understanding, I’d say a programming language is way more useful than Chinese. Why?

First, what are the odds you will learn Chinese well enough to read complicated texts in it, and understand them better than if you read a translation? My girlfriend has been studying Chinese for several years now, and she is now able to read children’s books.

Second, programming requires you to develop a new mindset, a different way to look at information and logic. A very significant part of the knowledge gained in the last decades lies in algorithms. There is a lot of extensive understanding in that directon too.

Given the enormous difference in effort between learning even a tad of Chinese and learing the basics of a programming language, I think it only fair to include an amount of actual program-writing in our course.

It is my experience that some people have no problem at all to translate a goal into an actually working program. But for others, this is somehow much more difficult, and then it really seems to require a whole new way of thinking. For these people it is hard, but they do gain a lot in more general problem-solving skills and finding abstractions behind particulars.

I doubt the same can be learned from flow charts.

C’mon, let’s talk about programing languages people actually use. This Haskell thing to computer languages

People use Haskell. But okay, Lisp/Scheme and Erlang are widely used. F# and Scala are probably going to be so in the next few years. I’m not really sure why you keep hammering this point, as you clearly don’t know much about programming.

you don’t need to know any programming languages to develop this ‘new mindset’. A simple flow-chart will suffice.

No it really won’t. That’s why people don’t develop using flow charts.

I’m not so sure all these people would be equally successful in learning a programming language.

I’m sure they would be equally successful in learning a programming language. There’s a small vocabulary and regular rules. How can it not be easier?

It doesn’t mean that they will be able to make a useful database, but many people who know a language are not capable of writing a novel.

I’ve known people (at least two) who found it easier to pick up walking-around grammar in a new human language than to develop a new algorithm even in Excel or BASIC. (By ‘new algorithm’, I mean ‘equivalent of a spreadsheet with at least two formulas’, and BASIC was a desperate try at a languagey approach so they could pass whatever it was. Linguistics, maybe?)

It wasn’t the words and syntax, which of course they could memorize; it was something we didn’t know how to analogize to the language talent they clearly had. Possibly the problem was at the level of knowing why ‘colorless green ideas sleep furiously’ is not English.

They were odd cases, though. On the whole, I agree that computer languages are easier because they’re smaller and simpler; the hard part is in writing useful and correct code, which may be a difficulty in imagining (??) the world (???) in a new way. Perhaps we aren’t often judged on the usefulness and correctness of our natural speech.

righteous bubba, I have the vague belief that MIDI sequencers are or can be Turing-complete (ignoring the practical song length limitation that we ignore in hard disk data storage). That’s why I said ‘part of a programming language’. Casual Googling doesn’t say anything about this, and I’m too lazy to read the definitions.

Golly that’s a bad last sentence. “MIDI is” to the front of it and it’ll make more sense even if it’s ugly.

I’m not really sure why you keep hammering this point, as you clearly don’t know much about programming.

No, it’s the opposite: I’ve been doing this for a long time and I find that it’s usually very easy for me to pick up a new programming language; I don’t even need to ‘learn’ it, just reading/modifying some code examples is enough in most cases. I’ll admit, though, that I’m not familiar with those more exotic languages you mentioned. If they are indeed used as widely as you say, then you sure have a point there.

That’s why people don’t develop using flow charts.

Interesting. Again, my impression is that the opposite is true. You develop using flow charts (and a lot of scribbling) and then someone will do the coding, which is the easy part.

As a programmer (COBOL, C, Java, Perl, Python, some Lisp) who also learned a few foreign languages, I can tell you that it is way easier to learn a new programming language (even your first) than it is to learn a new foreign language. Way, way easier.

Sure, but you are a programmer, the equivalent to which with regard to languages would be a linguist or a formally trained translator. Also you most likely had something like two decades worth of formal education. The people I’m talking about might have grown up in some African village or god knows where and might only have gone to primary school, yet many of them still seem capable of learning enough English to be able to interact successfully with foreigners.

There’s a small vocabulary and regular rules. How can it not be easier? It doesn’t mean that they will be able to make a useful database, but many people who know a language are not capable of writing a novel.

Again, just knowing a few rules and expressions doesn’t mean that you know a programming or even scripting language. If you can’t apply this knowledge to solve the problems that will be thrown at you, you don’t really know anything useful. Conversely, even conducting a basic conversation in a foreign language with someone involves constantly using your skills to solve unforeseen problems and many people are able to reach such a level rather quickly and easily. And a lot of people, e.g. the Dutch, Germans and Scandinavians speak near perfect English, easily surpassing a good percentage of native speakers as far as grammar and vocabulary is concerned.

I think it’s a bit of a myth among Anglo-Saxon people that foreign languages are generally incredibly hard to learn. This might be due to the fact that most of them are not forced to learn one, since they’ll get by with English just fine in many cases.

As a person close to linguistics, I must say this whole discussion is off key. It is ridiculous to even compare real languages with programming ones. (Before someone goes there, yes, I know a few of each kind…) Putting aside the issues of complexity which are nearly always much higher in natural languages, and our predisposition to learn exactly those kinds of structures which are found in natural lgs, there is one major difference – adaptability. Programming always has to follow very strict rules. Speaking doesn’t. That’s the whole point of a natural language – it changes, flows, adapts. You don’t need to use exact words or precise grammar to be understood, unlike with the machines. Plus, people make huge use out of context – smth the computers are just beginning to do, very poorly. :)

MI’m sure no one with any knowledge of a programming language would mistake it for a real language in any sense. The interesting question is more along the lines of ‘what subject is useful to teach as an extra course to college-level students’, and the language part is just a silly means to put two very distincts subjects together.

My personal view: If you only speak your mother tongue, choose to learn another language, if only to see how languages are similar or different.
But after that I wouldn’t necessesarily learn another language unless you expect to really use it. If ‘broadening your mind’ is your goal, learning to program a computer probably gives you more broadening for the efort it takes than learning a third language.

I think it’s a bit of a myth among Anglo-Saxon people that foreign languages are generally incredibly hard to learn.

I think they are hard to learn when you’re older than 16-17 or so, and incredibly hard if you’re older than 35 or so. Unless, of course, you have a special talent for languages.

But GZ, isn’t your argument somewhat circular. If you are in an (anglophone) environment where the most “interesting” questions have to do with career-planning, and the timing of this volume of effort against that, with a view to “actually planning to use” some skill, then you will naturally end up maximizing those skills that deal with manipulable objects, or that take the world to be the universe of manipulable objects, and consequently you end up minimizing your ability to go outside that (anglophone) environment. The assumption ends up being that outside of that environment, “there’s really very little there”, instead of “let’s go there and see.” “Broadening your mind” as “learning something without actually planning to use it”, is like a residual basket where you put those activities that are drop-outs from the mainstream. The longer the process goes on, the more difficult it becomes to even articulate the other point of view. (In the 1940s, Horkheimer and that group complained about the trend, but they still held out hope for independent thinking and philosophy. But that’s now become like another foreign language…)

Badger, I see no contradiction. I am arguing that learning to program is still a good exercise for people who do NOT expect to actually write computer programs for a living. The people I have in mind might be called liberal arts students in the US, but I’m not sure about that. They study languages, history, arts.
I know quite some people in this group who have a lot of trouble with the problem-solving, mathematically-abstract way of thinking that comes natural to many other poeple, including myself. And this leads to very much the situation you describe, where people assume “there’s really very little there”, and are indeed not able to articulate the other point of view.

So, it’s a bit of hobby-horse of mine to suggest to them to learn a simple computer language, because programming seems to require exactly the mindset that is so alien to them. Sometimes people are intrigued by the idea, but even then it gets a sort of ‘Read the Gilgamesh in the original’- unreachable status. Which simply isn’t necessary

GZ, I now see what you mean, that’s very sensible. Maybe I should try it and see what it’s like.

But naturally I’m with Mikhail on “the larger question”, plus I think there’s a balance that needs to be redressed (to say the least).

Btw, I guess in the opposite case to the one you describe, the comparable advice to try one of the easier languages, might not work as well. In those cases, access to the alien mindset I think is a little different, but I will not bore you.

I’m north-american, GZ, and for instance I’ve taught myself a reading knowledge of Arabic, in the period since 9/11, in order to be able to cope, as an educated citizen, with the wave of propaganda respecting that part of the world that we all knew would be coming down the pike. Call me lofty and impractical. It was an effort, but it is not as daunting as people think. You can learn the alphabet, for instance, in a fun way by checking titles on AlJazeera for proper names and that way you can confirm that you know the letters with their sounds. Then you get a dictionary with the three-character roots, and you learn the transformations that generate vast vocabulary from relatively few roots. And so on. Start reading the simplest material and you find there is a variety of interesting points of view that get passed over in the anglophone world. The question of a translated book and its original doesn’t arise. You don’t need that much Arabic to do better than reading Juan Cole, shall we say.

So on those points, I would not call the time and effort enormous, considering that it is also enjoyable, and the returns come much faster that you would think.

The other thing about “lofty and impractical” is that there is learning process itself, (which I think could be what some of those irritating anglos might be trying to get at in their stuttering way), because in natural-language learning there is the combination of rote dog-work practice on the one hand with acquisition of meanings on the other, the same as in learning a musical instrument, and some people find that process remarkable when they notice it.

I do think you’re on to something with the difference between having been educated in Netherlands, say, and the anglo world, so I do think youse have a head start on us in the world.