All through high school I was a fairly typical child in that I rather disliked English class. What I didn’t realize though was that I really loved languages. As a computer programmer, I have learned more than I expected about languages in general, and how there are many parallels between computer and human languages.
In recent years I have been able to pursue one of my childhood dreams of studying Asian languages. Through this I have learned that there are actually several similarities between the way you learn human languages and the way you learn computer languages. One of the basic grammatical fundamentals of any human language is the parts of speech. A statement in a computer language can be dissected much the same way as an english sentence. Take, for example, this sentence: Drink Jolt. We have 3 parts of sheech represented in this sentence: the understood subject, the verb and the object. In a computer language, we might express this like so: self.drink(jolt). In this analogue, self is performing the action drink with an object jolt.
From this rather simple example, armed with some basic knowledge of the “parts of speech,” you can start to get a feel for the syntax of this computer language. If we were to look at more examples like this you could get an even better feel for how these “parts of speech” are arranged. After you have learned these fundamentals, you can quickly expand your knowledge of a computer language by learning more “vocabulary.” This is another way in which the learning process is parallel to that of a human language. After you have mastered the basics of grammar, all that is left to do is expand your vocabulary in order to master a language.
As one of the owners of The Worthwhile Company frequently says, “it’s all about patterns.” This is readily apparent to anyone involved in bit-building, and as such, I started to notice patterns that developed as I learned computer languages. Now I am seeing that the same patterns hold true for human languages too. So, if you’re a programmer, go out and try to pick up another language! Perhaps you’ll end up being a polyglot some day.
