"Ian Bogost has an interesting argument that computer languages are not languages, but systems. He starts off arguing that learning a programming language shouldn’t meet a curricular requirement for learning a natural language. That’s a fair argument, except he does so on the basis that computer languages are not languages at all.
It clearly does translate. You can either translate literally from C to Perl (but not really vice-versa), or idiomatically. It’s straightforward to translate from C to English, but difficult to translate from English to C. But then, it’s difficult to translate a joke between sign and spoken language; that doesn’t mean that sign language isn’t a language, indeed sign languages are just as rich as spoken ones..." Alex McLean. more... http://yaxu.org/languages-are-languages/ _______________________________________________ NetBehaviour mailing list [email protected] http://www.netbehaviour.org/mailman/listinfo/netbehaviour
