As a software engineer and graduating Linguistics major at Berkeley, I can say without a doubt that this is total bollocks. The author's poor understanding of n

As a software engineer and graduating Linguistics major at Berkeley, I can say without a doubt that this is total bollocks. The author's poor understanding of natural language is clear. As far as my own anecdotal experience can be trusted (as one who has studied Greek, Latin, German, Anglo-Saxon and Sumerian in depth, and as one who has learnt many programming languages), education in programming languages does not augment understanding of natural languages. There are indeed theoretical relations (when looking at syntax, semantics and formal language theory, etc.); but these are largely irrelevant to someone who is trying to derive value from actually _knowing_ languages, rather than someone trying to understand the general structure of Language itself. In addition, his total misunderstanding of programming languages is indicated by the inane turn of phrase, “If you want to require a useful language, make it Java or Perl or Python or any object-oriented language rather than Spanish.” What could possibly make an object-oriented language any closer to fulfilling a natural language requirement than a different programming language? Note that I'm not at this very moment arguing that OO languages are bad (ask me about that some other time); I'm simply noting that whether or not a language is OO is orthogonal to his point. In the best case, he's dropping names unnecessarily; in the worst case, he's repeating words that he doesn't understand. It would be like saying, “If you want to learn how to cook, start with spaghetti, manicotti, or any other kind of pasta”; it naturally brings up the question, “Why must one learn to cook using pasta?”