this post was submitted on 28 Jun 2023
72 points (96.2% liked)

Asklemmy

43750 readers
1189 users here now

A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions

Search asklemmy 🔍

If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!

  1. Open-ended question
  2. Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
  3. Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
  4. Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
  5. An actual topic of discussion

Looking for support?

Looking for a community?

~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_[email protected]~

founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
72
Do you speak computer and human? (lemmy.ml)
submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
50 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

I've observed a connection between lovers of computer languages, and lovers of human languages.

If you are interested in coding or linguistics, are you interested in both or just one of of the two? If only one interests you, which one and why? If both interest you, do they seem related to one another?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

They seems to be really different though, you don’t “Speak” or write a computer program like you write a text or a poem, it’s a totally different thinking process.

For one, you're using a complex system of communication, where the meaning of each unit meaning changes, depending on context and the agreement between speaker and hearer. The system is used for phatic, performatic, epistemic, deontic statements, plus more; and it's usually tied into utterances and discourse in a higher level. And it's such a mess that would make any spaghetti code look cleaner in comparison.

For the other, you're delivering a set of instructions. It behaves far more like maths over strictly performative statements than like the above. If you say x = 1, then x is 1. And if you ask if x == 1, you'll get a true/false output, not any sort of implicature or "it depends on context".