> Or did Sapiens do well in the ~HN/Silicon Valley community because of some other underlying reason? The knowledge gained from the study of historical linguis

> Or did Sapiens do well in the ~HN/Silicon Valley community because of some other underlying reason? The knowledge gained from the study of historical linguistics, and from there the structure of natural language itself, was foundational to the creation of formal language theory, and from there the creation of the programming languages that we use today, which would not exist if not for the creation of generative grammars. In that sense, there is a very direct link (down to specific people like Noam Chomsky who researched both natural language and computation) between natural linguistics and computer science.