When McWhorter came to the Lensic on one of his tours, he made a rhetorically powerful argument against the Whorfian hypothesis in natural languages. I now tend to side with him, even though I cannot really remember the structure of his argument. On the other hand, SteveS makes a great point regarding translations of programs between languages. Barry's comment also, for me, rings true. Perhaps, a kernel of the programmer's first language is to be found in all future writing. Computer languages, unlike Athena, do not come fully formed from the head. The state of the art continues to be under radical development and is not just engaged in an empty proliferation of simulacra. The work of logicians and philosophers, each with a stake in the development of human thinking itself, continue to help move the art forward. The ideas of Categorical logicians continue to develop languages like Haskell, and those (academic) ideas continue to direct and further refine the development of otherwise sprawling spaghetti monster languages like javascript (React, for instance). The work of homotopy type theorists continues to improve our understanding of automatic proof, the reasonability of mathematical objects, and refinement of philosophically useful notions like dependent typing (Agda, Coq, Isabelle). The interactions here are rich and not unidirectional. The ideas being developed are meaningful to the state-of-the-art and not just more FORTRAN. While it might be true that Alonzo Church gave us computation, there is still much to be discovered.
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