Beware of the Train

The relationship between human languages and programming languages is interesting to me. In general, programming languages are a lot simpler (which is great, because it makes it easier to learn lots of them): they also have rather less vocabulary (but that's OK, because you're actively encouraged to make up your own). We talk about programming "idiomatically": while it's often possible to use one language's idioms in another, they can look almost as odd as, say, Japanese idioms used in English. In the evolution of programming languages, you can see a super-compressed version of the evolution of human languages: ideas, grammatical forms, and vocabulary transfer from one language to another where there's contact between the two communities, and languages split into mutually-unintelligible descendants when the communities fracture. There's at least one example of creolization that I'm aware of: the programming language Perl can be considered a creole of C, shell, sed and awk (and has since absorbed features from many other languages). Perl's also been heavily influenced by that other notable creole, English, and incorporates several features from human languages (like topicalization). It's no coincidence that Larry Wall, the original creator of Perl, studied linguistics at graduate school. In the opposite direction, you'll sometimes hear hackers describing human languages in terms derived from programming languages: Japanese is sometimes said to use reverse Polish notation.

But as I said, programming languages tend to be a lot simpler than human languages. In fact, so-called object-oriented languages (like, say, Java) have been described (perhaps "derided" is a better term) as languages in which everything is a noun: dually, so-called functional languages (like Haskell) could be described as languages in which everything is a verb. Actually, verbs and nouns cover pretty much everything in most programming languages. Perl has pronouns and conjunctions, and pronouns can be added to Lisp with sufficient cleverness; a couple of languages have something vaguely resembling adverbs.

So you can imagine my pleasure at learning yesterday that the language called J has gerunds :-)

*downloads J interpreter*


Fig. 1: The gerund attacks some peaceful pronouns (image courtesy n. molesworth)

While I'm here, I'll write down a few more IITESKAs that have been buzzing, half-formed, around my head, in some cases for months.

( Junk Dilemmas no. 63 )

This was actually one of the ideas that suggested this series to me - once I was aware of this thought (anti?)pattern, I kept noticing it in other contexts. I bet you will too, now. Which brings us on to...

( Whorfian mind-lock )

Whew. A couple of lighter ones:

( Paving cowpaths )

And finally, another one with a great name:

( Yak shaving )

* No relation to the Klingon.
** It's not - we have actual theorems and everything. It's just that the naysayers aren't comfortable enough with the language to understand their statements :-)