Do programming languages count? If so, I’m a polyglot.

That’s interesting, they’re two of my biggest interests. I wonder if this is true for a lot of other people.

I code in a few languages and I’ve always wanted to know more than one “human” language but efforts in that area have more or less consistently failed (exception being Esperanto because that’s easy, but since hardly anyone speaks it it’s not exactly useful).

Despite my interest in both I doubt there’s much of a correlation when you look at programmers (or polyglots) as a group, though. For all we call all of these things “languages” there’s a pretty big distinction and difference in complexity and approach between the computer and human ones, it’s a whole different hobby.

I’d compare coding more to other hobbies that involve making things. I knit a jumper, I develop a video game…scratches same itch.

Or possibly problem-solving hobbies. I work out how to adjust a sewing pattern to fit, I solve a tricksy sudoku…again same itch.

For me it’s both.

Language interest came from hearing my grandparents speak another language as a child, and coding from exploring early windows/dos and seeing what computers could do. Both are fueled by a curiosity and desire to know more so I’d say they’re only loosely connected in that way.

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I’m interested in linguistics in a linguistic way. Languages tell something about a culture. For examply by what subjects have many words and which don’t. Or how seperated ranks in society are by the amount of (used) formality forms. The level of directness might corolate to the level of pragmatism. What foreign influence there is can be partly seen by loanwords and writing symbols. Etc. Etc.

But computer languages are hardly linguistic, most of them are just English in a specific syntax. I love computers, but they interest me in a technical way. Even the best AI relies on switches turning off and on, yes and no’s, 1’s and 0’s. It’s black and white logical mathmatics. In the end, programming languages are little more than “the creator thought this was a good way to handle which switches should go on and off”, and you just use what’s most practical for your use-case. That is, quantum computers aside, but even those are similar in that really. Just more complex.

I’m interested in programming language theory but not as much in linguistics. There is some interesting overlap though. I think I like PLT because it is prescriptive, unambiguous and clear; whereas linguistics is an attempt to describe natural language, but has areas that are ambiguous and less clear (invisible green dragons sleep furiously, for one). This impedence mismatch is probably why natural language processing is such a difficult problem in computer science and why we tend to rely on AI for it.

Chomsky’s work in linguistics and grammars was incredibly important for computational parsing, be it source code or anything else. The Chomsky hierarchy (depicted and linked below) is important for developers writing parsers to know, because each category of grammar has different performance characteristics.

I have an interest in both, but have mainly focused on human language. I speak Danish (and by extension a fair bit of Norwegian and Swedish and English, and some level of reading in German, Spanish and French, and have studied Latin, Greek, Hebrew and Akkadian academically.

I’m considering getting back into coding for a career change now, haven’t really used it much since my teens. I used ASP, PHP and SQL.

I have a logic approach to both, I think, but they’re also quite different.

I myself am interested in both, I decided to specialize in programming, but did take a linguistics class back in highschool, in the class we constructed a fantasy language, and i still wave and occasionally update the documentation.

Coding languages and constructed human languages are bothan designed system of communication, its just that the targets are different. Coding languages (usually) unambiguously define a means of communicating structure and function, whereas human languages elvolve or are designed to communicate experience, something a lot more … nebulous.