3 ms·

That's interesting -- although I agree that it's important to distinguish programming languages from spoken languages and that they do very different things, I

by schoen 7y ago

That's interesting -- although I agree that it's important to distinguish programming languages from spoken languages and that they do very different things, I could imagine that the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis applies better to programming languages than to natural languages! After all, we hear all the time that programmers in a particular environment analyze problems differently, or think of different solutions, or do or don't write certain kinds of bugs, compared to programmers in a different environment. Since strong forms of Sapir-Whorf have come in for so much criticism among linguists as applied to natural language, I'm not sure my intuition about this points in the same direction as the author's!

empath75 7y ago
I agree, computer languages push you into particular ways of solving problems and away from other ways.
eindiran 7y ago
Paul Graham has an interesting take on the idea that the strong Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis applies to programming languages, though its not exactly phrased that way: http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html I tend to agree with your hypothesis: firstly, I don't think that the strong form of the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis holds for natural languages [0], which sets the bar pretty low for PLs. And secondly, the SWH does (seem to) hold for programming languages: the cognitive tools and abstractions reached for by users of language A can be very different from those reached for by users of language B. Lisp users, Haskell users, C users, Forth users, etc all seem to think about problems differently. It would be interesting to see some empirical work on this. [0] Almost all post-Chomsky linguists agree with this, but there are a few that have tried to argue that you can kind of bend the strong form to make it fit some empirical results; see the color word research of Paul Kay for example -- http://www1.icsi.berkeley.edu/~kay/Kay&Kempton.1984.pdf http://www1.icsi.berkeley.edu/~kay/Kay&Kempton.1984.pdf

by schoen 7y ago

empath75 7y ago

I agree, computer languages push you into particular ways of solving problems and away from other ways.

eindiran 7y ago

Paul Graham has an interesting take on the idea that the strong Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis applies to programming languages, though its not exactly phrased that way: http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html I tend to agree with your hypothesis: firstly, I don't think that the strong form of the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis holds for natural languages [0], which sets the bar pretty low for PLs. And secondly, the SWH does (seem to) hold for programming languages: the cognitive tools and abstractions reached for by users of language A can be very different from those reached for by users of language B. Lisp users, Haskell users, C users, Forth users, etc all seem to think about problems differently. It would be interesting to see some empirical work on this. [0] Almost all post-Chomsky linguists agree with this, but there are a few that have tried to argue that you can kind of bend the strong form to make it fit some empirical results; see the color word research of Paul Kay for example -- http://www1.icsi.berkeley.edu/~kay/Kay&Kempton.1984.pdf http://www1.icsi.berkeley.edu/~kay/Kay&Kempton.1984.pdf