Are Programming Languages Really Languages? - with CompChomp

Are programmers multilingual? Should Python, Ruby or Java count as foreign languages?

General CompChomp credits:

Code comprehension tasks used by Janet Siegmund et al:

CC-BY images specific to this video:
MRI machine, NIAMS-NIH

Pyro Flow, Sneaky Adventure, BlipStream, Cephalopod, Cut Trance, Danse Macabre, Pixelland, Adventure Meme

Upbeat Thoughts, Build Me Steadily

Ask Rufus

[popalupa]

011011001
That's 9 bits, and how are you supposed to crack a joke with one ASCII character?

[andor]

Well, I've never thought of the declaration of a main function as "I'm a program too", that's for sure.

[jgcooper]

nice video, though personally as someone who is into linguistics and programming, to me they're nothing alike.
i think kids should learn both, foreign languages AND programming, albeit as 2 different things so as not to confuse them.

to me programming is taking math or logic routines, and then grouping a bunch of them under one name, in order to abstract it up a level, and put it together with other grouped routines, and so on.

language is way less "mathy", and also it is way more linear, like a sentence or a paragraph has always the same outcome, while a programming routine can have various different outcomes which you gotta keep in mind when designing it, so it has more of a "simultaneous alternate possible universes" kinda thing going on.
which takes a different kind of thinking to get around it than regular languages.

not to say that natural languages dont have their own quirks, oh boy they do, but totally different things.

[triggerwarning]

You need to lead from formal languages up to natural languages.  While programming is using a language, it's not using a foreign language.  Language complexity is a REAL issue here.

[TheAkashicTraveller]

"stick label var1 on the number 23"

What, why would you describe it like this!? It makes my brain hurt just thinking about it.

[Tyanna]

As a software developer by profession, I don't agree with giving foreign langues credits for learning a programming language. A programming language is a tool for solving problems. A spoken/written language is something you need to communicate and make yourself understood.

While I feel that all kids should learn to code, I feel they should ALSO learn another language. Learning Java or Swift isn't going to help a child understand that not everyone speaks the same language they do and help them to communicate with people from other cultures.

[liesdamnlies]

"Stop teaching the kids BASIC."

The fact that my high school only taught BASIC in their programming course was the primary reason I completely ignored it and only started taking courses in programming after leaving high school. Why on earth would I want to deal with that? No one uses this anymore! Among other things.

If I want to fiddle with GOTO labels I'll do it in assembly, thanks. At least then I might be doing something useful.

[RedtreeJoe]

you guys don't need to try to force quirkiness it's just cringey

[shrekthetroll]

Languages serve the purpose of communication, whereas _programming_ languages are designed for instruction. Languages as humans use and define them are used to *communicate* back and forth with one another. This is not the case with code because it used to *instruct*; it is an entirely one-sided process. Thus programming languages, even if they are contrived of linguistic aspects cannot and should not be considered 'languages'. In other words, concepts can be _conceived_ in programming languages, but they cannot be _communicated_. I.e Things can be *built* with code, but they cannot be *said*.

[lilyc]

I'm a bit torn on whether programming languages should count as a foreign language course because while programming may turn out to be more useful, you simply cannot experience the culture and communication from coding. You don't just learn the Spanish language in Spanish class, you learn about culture, history, geography, etc. from a more Spanish point of view. Knowing another spoken language opens a lot of doors for you. On the other hand, a lot more students want to be coders and digital designers now-a-days than they want to travel or become linguists. Coding is pretty lucrative -- and popular -- and having a head-start by starting in high school will be very beneficial. Coding, just as foreign language, provides a whole new way of thinking. I don't think coding can really be considered a foreign language, but having CSS as your foreign language course.... hmm, doesn't sound too bad

[SteelSkin]

That break in what could have been a perfectly good while loop broke my heart.

[nienke]

she's so annoying that I become totally biased against anything she's explaining,
also, just because a certain part of the brain is used in both doesn't make it the same thing, and I also think that putting coding with the languages is both a negative thing for languages and for coding, they're rather different, have different goals, different benefits to knowing them, and different ways of learning them. learning how to code can be a very valuable skill set, but it doesn't give the same benefits and skills from a language, and vice versa

[Bane_questionmark]

I studied both Latin and coding in high school, and I have to tell you the biggest similarity to coding in Latin was reading and scanning poetry. Obviously they involves language in the sense that there are interrelated "packets" of meaning that combine with and modify each other, but neither require anything like "conversational capability". Programming languages do communicate in the sense that they relay instructions, but actually writing code is more about working out relationships between things and arranging them correctly. This is one aspect of language but it's more comparable to a puzzle of some type.

I may have rambled a bit, but my point is that programming languages may be languages in the strictest sense, but learning them doesn't accomplish the things intended when learning a foreign, "human" language. It's still useful to learn, obviously, just not useful as a foreign language credit.

[ragnkja]

Given that it’s a well-known fact that learning new languages becomes easier the more languages you already know, one way to decide whether programming languages should count for foreign language credits is to consider whether knowing several natural languages makes it easier to learn programming languages and vice versa.

[GhostEmblem]

I was so happy when she said that teaching/learning basic is a bad idea, basic isnt a programming language.

[MusicalRaichu]

What does the word "language" even mean? Tell me that definition first, then I'll tell you whether programming languages are really languages or not.

You're saying that because people using linguistic skills to read/write code, that makes programming languages a language. Have you looked to see what other tasks involve linguistic skills, such as decoding the icons at the bottom of a YouTube video? You're inconspicuously setting up a definition of language that might not agree with mine or someone else's.

It's like asking whether a virus is a living thing or not. Is it just a bunch of complex molecules that can react with its surrounding and self-replicate, or is it an organism that can assimilate matter and reproduce? It's all a matter of definition.

[TheItalianoAssassino]

Aren't programming languages just a modified version of English?

[sarowie]

Learning a language has a cultural part and a "theory of mind" part. Plenty of US-Americans are culturally insensitive and think, that everybody in the world "thinks" in english. Not learning a foreign language is one of the core roots of that problem. One example regarding language: US-Americas start to yell at foreigners, when they do not understand English. Many americans are like children, that do not understand that people think in their native tongue, not in english (and that it is a long learning process to think in a foreign tongue is an admirable achievement).
In german for example, we simplify the grammar and conjugation when speaking to foreigners - that can be considered offensive at times, but it is a way of "changing in someone elses shoes" and thinking about where the issue in the communication actually is and how work around that.
I mean: The benefit of learning a programming language is, that this would prevent people from yelling at computers, but this would not help foreigners and other people that have learned English as a second language.

[Sintoolkicks]

For a five minute video that intro was unnecessarily long.

[TheSentientCloud]

As both an avid coder and avid language learner I can absolutely say that they aren't very different.
Semicolons are like periods. Curly braces are like paragraphs. It's a language with an entirely different grammar.