from Hacker News

Programming as a Foreign Language

by redsquirrel on 5/17/12, 1:12 AM with 15 comments

• by h2s on 5/17/12, 6:40 AM

  I wish more developers treated learning to program like learning a foreign language. When you're learning a foreign language, your #1 goal is to cast off any poor grammar or pronunciation and sound like an intelligent native speaker. It's been my experience that people often don't care very much about doing this with the programming languages they use.

  Routines that are too long and ought to be refactored into smaller ones are akin to run-on sentences. Leaving out semicolons in your JavaScript is like speaking French in an Italian accent because you already know Italian and French people seem to more or less understand it. And people who refuse to follow prevailing code style guidelines? Those are your "Everyone there speaks English anyway" folks.

  Such poor communication skills would be humiliating when trying to communicate in a foreign language, but for some reason people often wear them like a badge of honour when trying to communicate in a programming language.

• by masterponomo on 5/17/12, 2:25 AM

  Makes me think about programming IN a foreign language. One time we had to fix some code a Turkish client had added to our system. The spec and the code were in Turkish (imagine Turkish COBOL if you will). We somehow got it done by trial and error (Is THIS what you want? No? How about THIS?) I have no idea whether this means anything, but we came away saying "Berklat bokari" to each other at random moments on future assignments. Those words or something like them kept appearing in the Turkish code.

• by yuchi on 5/17/12, 8:56 AM

  My girlfriend is seriously interested in linguistics. When she discovered I learned to code when I was a kid, and given the speed at which I learn (and forget!) foreign languages during my journeys in Europe, she ended up with the idea that learning a programming language is a similar procedure to that of a speaking language.

  She also thinks that my ability to learn languages has been maintained strong by the fact I learnt a new programming language every year.

  Also, the fact that bilingual kids are able to retain for a longer time the ability to learn languages made her think that as a kid I could be considered as bilingual.

  I had the chance to confirm this looking at a colleague of mine who started to code as a kid too. Looks like we have some common abilities in language learning.

• by Zenst on 5/17/12, 4:16 AM

  I had to work on some dutch COBOL once, was actualy realy easy if you take the standard approach and that is to ignore ALL comments as the code is the only documentation you can truely trust.

  But the only truely universal language for programming has to be bainfuck :).

• by tikhonj on 5/17/12, 3:13 AM

  It's funny, but I've actually used the opposite idea: approaching the grammar of foreign languages like a programming language. Most programming languages are just historic collections of arbitrary rules, most of which make some amount of sense. Most natural languages are the same thing on a much grander scale. Thinking about grammar like this helped me learn it properly.

• by tom_b on 5/17/12, 1:50 PM

  There are some interesting research efforts that explore the link between early-age bilingual learners and positive cognitive effects [1].

  What is striking to me is that hackers have long made statements that learning different programming language paradigms makes us better hackers. While we can make anecdotal arguments that being a good functional and a good imperative programmer makes us better hackers in general, the above research is exploring the idea that multi-language proficiency has positive cognitive effects that cross domains.

  [1] Carlson S. M. & Meltzoff A. N. (2008). Bilingual experience and executive functioning in young children. Developmental Science, 11, 282–298. Availabe at http://ilabs.washington.edu/meltzoff/pdf/08Carlson_Meltzoff_...

• by jwingy on 5/17/12, 3:29 AM

  Interesting comparison, but I find it hard to relate to at all simply due to the sheer amount of words you need to learn in a real foreign language to achieve fluency. Seems much more daunting to me...but I guess my glasses are tinted.