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Not at all. Learning a new programming language (let's say being able to "converse" in a new programming language) is not even close to the difficulty of being

Not at all. Learning a new programming language (let's say being able to "converse" in a new programming language) is not even close to the difficulty of being able to converse in a new human language. I know (I've coded professionally) C, C++, C#, JavaScript, typescript, Ruby, python, scheme. I can read and understand Rust, any c-like language, Scala, brainfuck and many others. I could confidently say that I could understand pretty much any programming language. On the other hand I can speak Spanish, English. I can "converse" in French (formally studied), Portuguese and some Italian. I'm learning Mandarin right now. I studied Latin for several years. Human languages are so much harder because (among many other factors) their grammars are so much complicated, also languages evolve in time. Computer languages they are all very similar and their grammars and orders of magnitude more simple (they have to be in order to fulfill their goal of being mapped to instructions on a Turing Machine). I could confidently say that no matter how much I try, I probably would not understand any human language unless I dedicated a non-trivial amount of time and effort to learn it. And that just for getting to a colloquial level of dialogue. If I ever wanted to be productive professionally reading/writing it would be way more hard.

astrodust 8y ago
That's probably because in computer languages we invent our own dialects as the core is pretty feeble: "Jane get ball, ball is red. Red ball goes down hill." So that becomes "getBall()", "dropBall()" and so on where with a heavy helping of English, or whatever human language you prefer, you can slather on top a lot of semantic meaning that isn't there otherwise. If you only had to learn basic grammar and fifty words you could be fluent in a hundred languages in a month.

astrodust 8y ago

That's probably because in computer languages we invent our own dialects as the core is pretty feeble: "Jane get ball, ball is red. Red ball goes down hill." So that becomes "getBall()", "dropBall()" and so on where with a heavy helping of English, or whatever human language you prefer, you can slather on top a lot of semantic meaning that isn't there otherwise. If you only had to learn basic grammar and fifty words you could be fluent in a hundred languages in a month.