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Comment by abraham | Hacker News Reader

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abraham·

Including programming languages?

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NO.

Why do people conflate the two?

Because we use the same word to describe both.

If you want to take this to its logical conclusion, then language is nothing but a fixed set of "alphabet", and a set of rules that generate infinite strings from this alphabet in some meaningful combination.

Alright, I will start: I am fluent in the language of traffic signs.

The confusion isn't coming from conceptual similarity, though. It's coming from the use of the word "language" which has multiple, distinct connotations. Traffic signs are never referred to as "language." Both spoken and programming languages are.

I'll bet that if you talk to designers and road layout experts, they'll freely talk about the "language of traffic signs". I'd also hazard a guess that people who are not programmers or familiar with how it all works would not refer to what we work with as a language, but as "code", "mathematics", "bits and bytes" etc.

The numerical-analysis community refers to software as "codes" :-)

I have recently seen a SIAM book that even had it in the title.

Oops, misclick downvote. I agree with you. It's an unfortunate human cognitive weakness to assume that things with the same label are the same.

You don't know how ironic that comment is.

I'm all jumpy with glee reading it.

"misclick downvote" ..

Do you realize the up and down buttons are IDENTICAL in "syntax" but different in "semantics"? Isometry :-)

On a programming language centret website you have to be specific in terms and descriptions.

Fluency generally includes speech fluency. I haven't met a person who speaks in code. With all the abstraction, looping going around, it is difficult to speak in one of the programming languages.

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