Being good at linguistics doesn't necessarilly mean you're good at communication in everyday settings. I could probably talk about Whorf-Sapir all day, but if I tried to do it in front of my friends at a restaurant, I would probably get a bunch of blank stares.

Highlighting my point nicely. The first response to my OP doesn't say 'WTF is Whorf-Sapir?', but happily states that he could talk about it all day.

What I meant was that there seems to be a greater knowledge and interest in linguistics hereabouts than one might necessarily expect.

g0n, backpropagated monk

That was quietly my response :) ... so off to the web. For those who don't know, like me, here is a link. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sapir-Whorf_hypothesis. BTW, thanks for the trigger for today's self-education.

-jbWare

Both fields attract people who are interested in the generative nature of things (how cool is this ... a tiny little set of words can generate an infinite number of novel sentences/programs).

The philosophical issue of knowledge representation is both the means and the end for programmers and linguistics.

As for Perl in particular, its practicality commends it to linguists - one can babble on forever about the meaning of words, but linguists usually are grounded in the actual use of words just as Perl appeals to those who want to get practical tasks accomplished. Perl's pattern matching appeals to linguists both for the concept of pattern and because it allows us to work with texts on many levels.

So does perl & PM attract people with an interest in linguistics, or perhaps foster an interest in language?

The fact that non-native speakers of English post here in English doesn't mean that Perl attracts people with a linguistic interest. It reflects several things:

• People not being able to post in English don't post on PM.
• English is a required subject on high schools around the world.
• English is a the de facto common language in the IT world.

Text analysis quickly brings up regex and Perl as an obvious choice. It is how I started using perl many years ago.

Being interested in text parsing, I asked the monks whether there existed language regex collections (see NLP - natural language regex-collections?). Such collections do not seem to exist. I still don't know whether this is out of lack of interest, or lack of possibility. I hope it is the former, so I will be able to do it myself ;)

Also, interest is not the same as expertise, and in this specific subject (Linguistic Computing) even expertise may only be 'promising' (as opposed to delivering). I hope I'm wrong.

I think that Perl programmers are brighter than average and likely more widely educated, either academically or experientially. They have many interests, a good sense of humour, and probably know a variety of languages (both spoken and programming).

So linguistics is a natural for this group: dissecting language, both spoken and programmed is just 'fun' for this group. Something an Apocalypse or an Orwant rant (the one at YAPC 19100 was the one I remember) is good clean fun and terrific entertainment. Or Ingy's talk about Inline::C at YAPC 2001. Or any talk by Damian Conway.

And that's one of the reasons I love to visit PM, or go to YAPC; there are so many bright folks around, there's rarely a dull moment.

This ties into a secondary level of interest – how can I communicate my thoughts and ideas to others (people, computers, the cosmos and so on).

How many ways do you communicate throughout a day? How many ways do you combine those ways?

Linguistics is merely one vast discipline amongst many, but it is wildly flexible and subject to play because it can be melded on the sending end as well as massaged on the receiving end.

Also any form of play gets the creative juices flowing, and language is a fine way of communicating in a text based technology, such as PM.

Thanks for a great post ++

Does perl & PM attract people with an interest in linguistics?

While programming languages are bona fide written languages, the perception of languages strongly influences ones desire to learn a language, programming or otherwise. I would speculate that of the subset of linguists who are competent programmers, few know perl. Programmers and linguists have completely different criteria (and perspectives) for evaluating a programming language. While programmers can speculate as to the requirements and preferences of linguists, such speculation would amount to mere speculation. You'd have to poll linguists.

Does perl & PM foster an interest in language?

While perl is a valid written language, coding perl programs does not supplant the need to cultivate non-programming linguistic skills. The existance of such nodes as "Cool Uses for Perl", "Perl Poetry", and "Obsfucated Code" indicates an interest in linguistics as it pertains to programming; however this does not necessitate interest in linguistics in general. Moreover, there is a difference between programming, communication, and linguistics. Poor documentation may be written by an adept programmer, unable to communicate the language necessary for clarity. Furthermore, the quality of the writing is not indicative of ones interest in linguistics.

With regard to perl specifically, while there are a variety of Lingua modules on CPAN, the nature of the modules does not seem to promote linguistics with the possible exceptions of Latin (Lingua::Romana::Perligata) and Chinese (Lingua::Sinica::PerlYuYan).

Frankly, it would be difficult to isolate perl's contribution to an individuals linguistical inclinations.

In that case perhaps I should delete my PM account ;-) One of the main ideas behind Asperger is that one side of the brain is far more active than the other...yet for some reason especially Perl feels really good to work with.
Remember rule one...

I googled for "brain hemispheres", and came across a few interesting links, about people who had their Corpus Collosum severed ( a few years ago, the witch doctors thought that cutting it would prevent seizures). Anyways, it seems either hemisphere is capable of providing the function of the other...maybe at a subdued level.

Personally, I believe the brain is like a radio tranceiver. We tune into certain "thought broadcasts", and likewise, we transmit. But it also has a "dis-connected auto-mode", which sadly, most people run on. :-)

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I'm not really a human, but I play one on earth. flash japh