I don't know about you, but I for one have used Perl as a language to communicate with other human beings, not a computer. Be it simple snippets in emails (s/indead/indeed/ , "onething" != "otherthing"), perlmonk nodes or Perl Poetry, all of these are written in Perl for the pure intention of communicating with other people, because I found it funnier, more concise or even just possible to express things in this language than in another. Also, don't forget that languages can take many forms and while it may be harder to express certain things in one language than another, that will not make the language in question less valid.

So "computer languages" are nothing else than languages which can be understood by humans and also be interpreted by a computer. Yes, they're constructed languages rather than natural ones, but so are Esperanto and Sindarin. You won't deny those are languages either, will you?.

As for your point about the term "computer languages" making us more willing to exploit other people, bah, total humbug. Look to the economists, not the computer scientists for that one.


All dogma is stupid.

In reply to Re^2: Perl and Linguistics by tirwhan
in thread Perl and Linguistics by Cody Pendant

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