Kari and Richard's attention to symbols, definition, and meaning is highly appropriate, but there's another angle at play here which I think is more central to the language-ness of programming languages. I'd like to share an analogy that's stuck with me for several when thinking about the distinction between "programming" and "natural" as modifiers for the concept of language (particularly one that tries to side-step discussion of symbols).
Consider the representation of some physical value such as the temperature of a room. We can make a "programming" representation of this value with some configuration of a fixed number of bits (an int in a machine word). Likewise, we can make a "natural" representation of the value with, um, another physical value such as a voltage or height of a mercury column in a thermometer. The programming representation has a very chunky, discrete range of expression with delivers a set number of bits of information. Meanwhile, the natural representation smoothly ranges over some continuous domain, conveying a fuzzy/undefined amount of information bounded by a complex interaction of external noise sources and sampling error. In programming languages, we've got these very discrete sequences of, say, ascii characters, some subset of which are blessed by a particular context-free grammar to be valid. Program code isn't bounded in the same way as a 32-bit unsigned int, but it has a similar discrete feeling. Meanwhile, natural language encompass a seemingly infinite domain of expression, but the deeper we dig in extracting information from an utterance, the more we need to make assumptions about where the message came from and how well we heard it. Programming representations invite us to interpret (parse/compile/execute/etc.) them once and be confident that we got everything important on the first try. Natural representations invite us to repeatedly ask refining questions, allowing subsequent samples to change our mind about inferences from the first question. And ADC can convert a noisy (at some level) electrical signal into a discrete digital symbol by repreatedly checking whether the signal is currently above or below certain reference voltages. Indeed any amount of digital information can be packed into some real value (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arithmetic_coding), but for practical purposes you will stop after some number of iterations. Natural language can be subject to a similar process where seemingly limitless information can be sucked out of a fixed natural language input via close reading and the asking of a lot of tiny questions (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deconstruction seems to experimentally probe for the practical limits here). This analogy between languages and simple physical values gives us a way to talk about particular non-natural-nesses of programming languages without references to symbols and semantics. (And if code is data and you can store any data in a big fat bitstring, then it shouldn't be saying anything too controversial.) But I'm somewhat of an advocate for programming languages as languages, so now I want to show how practical programming representations regularly find themselves creeping in the natural direction. Consider the generation of html documentation from java code using javadoc. The official java compiler immediately throws away a lot of information when it reads your source (comments, indentation, the order of certain declarations, etc.). The javadoc code analyser, on the other hand, makes a few assumptions about where the code came from (that the programmer followed certain common practices). This allows it to slurp up and save many comments and tie them to the constructs they describe (conventionally, the declaration on the next line). The tool remembers enough of your (not-so-superfluous) code formatting to provide click-through links to particular locations in the source. Certainly human java programmers "read into the text" a lot more than the official compiler does, but this extended, extra-grammatical interpretation process is not exclusive to humans. Because I'm a fan of Richard's, this next example uses Prolog. Metaprogramming regularly involves reading deeper and deeper meanings from a snippet of object language (with the meta-language being something we are comfortable calling a programming language). The prolog snippet "connect_via(kitchen,dining_room,west)." is a 100% complete and valid program, but it doesn't do much to execute it (other than populate a conceptual table). By piling on more and more assumptions in the surrounding code, we can infer from this snippet (1) an instruction in the larger process of building a house, (2) a specification for how some existing house was built, (3) a description of (query for) houses out of some external database, or many other things. It's not that we can get these meanings the snippet ended with a full stop making it a complete statement, just knowing that a loose term of that shape existed in some list of lists somewhere might lead us to the same inferences in metaprogramming. In a final example, consider livecoding. While usually carried out via the medium of a canonically "programming" language, what we see in the livecoder's projected screen during a performance is almost always incomplete, ungrammatical, and filled with symbols that have yet to be given meaning by reference in other bits of code. Similar to the way we verbally communicate using only-locally-coherent, sometimes-overlapping islands of grammatical speech, the livecoder's text editor (more like a workbench), is covered with fragments of programs yet-to-be or no-longer valid. Functions will be defined only to not be used for several more minutes, and large declarations will be fractured so that their body can be modified and re-evaluated via manual selection. Impromptu (a relatively popular livecoding environment) may speak Scheme, but you would be very hard pressed to find a point in a livecoding session where saving the text currently in the buffer actually results in an executable program -- sounds very much like "natural" languages, right? (And this is to say nothing of the use of metaprogramming in livecoding, or the temporal and even two-way negotiation of meaning the happens.) This has been longer than I expected my first post to this list to be, but I hope I can inspire some new thoughts on language-ness. -- The Open University is incorporated by Royal Charter (RC 000391), an exempt charity in England & Wales and a charity registered in Scotland (SC 038302).
