No, he wouldn’t. Programming languages have virtually no vocabulary, compared to natural languages. The differences between two programming languages aren’t the same kind of thing as the differences between two natural languages. Developers already pick up new programming languages easily, and talent there comes from being able to absorb its documentation rapidly.
If we know he has a good memory and doesn’t forget stuff, that is generally an advantage, but the connection that it is a “language” is not the reason.
You think? There's syntax, grammar, and idioms. Of course there are significant differences, but there's significant overlap too. As someone not linguistically inclined, I also notice myself looking for the name of the built-in method of a programming language I've used for 5 years. One might imagine a person with a better memory for vocabulary would be more capable of remembering the word/method name without needing to look it up.
"Does having an aptitude for spoken languages mean you'll have an aptitude for programming languages" is a different question from "are programming languages languages" even if the answer to both questions is the same.
But linguists have approached this question from time to time! The main stumbling block is highly literate people are inclined to think of writing as language but it's not, quite. You can have multiple writing systems for the same spoken language, or be fluent but illiterate. But you can't comprehend a writing system for a language you can't speak, barring disability.
So programming languages do have grammar, but not the other components of a language. Idioms in programming are a metaphor referencing linguistic idioms but structurally they aren't the same. Programming languages are more similar to writing systems, and a lot of linguistics findings do apply to them when taken in that context.
You can play around with this idea if you want. Try to convey meaning to someone using only a programming language and nothing else. This is tricky because they embed our other writing systems, so you need to be careful not to accidentally convey meaning with eg variable names. Might be best to use something like brainfuck or piet that prevents that entirely. If it's a language in the "human languages" sense, you'll be able to convey any arbitrary meaning to another person who knows that programming language, even if you don't share a spoken one.
What ends up happening is you can only do this if you reference a shared spoken language. So you can warp a PL into a writing system, but you can't use it alone to communicate.
But meaning (and even understanding of the world) is shaped by the language. Think of how one language has 40 words for different kinds of happiness, another doesn't have the word blue.
My question was "would natural hyperpolyglot be better capable of learning/using programming languages", and I don't think any of what you said tells us one way or the other. Yes, the things being expressed with programming languages are different from the things being expressed with natural languages, but they are both designed for expression and communicating meaning. I'd love to see studies on whether there's any relationship between being able to easily pick up and retain human languages, and the same for programming languages.
edit: note, that I'm not even asking if someone with an aptitude for human languages would be good at using programming languages. Obviously the logical components, required for doing a lot of things with them, are a completely separate skill.
I'm only wondering if he'd have an aptitude for learning a language, in terms of syntax, grammar, standard library and associated methods, idioms.
They're all shorthand abstract systems that define static relationships between a fairly small number of symbols arranged in a fairly small number of ways to define a fairly small set of meanings.
Example: a circuit diagram. You have a transistor and some other components, and if you know the language you can recognise it as an emitter follower. It's a very concrete and clear mapping.
There aren't many things you can do with a transistor. When you've learned them all, that's basically it.
Human languages are much bigger. If you ignore the alphabet level and start with words, there are thousands of symbols (tens of thousands for advanced users). And most of language is about implication and context.
If a partner says "What time will you be back tonight?" that can mean anything from "Because my car is still in the garage, can I borrow your car?" to "Are you still having an affair?" to "Will you make it in time for curfew?"
In most conversations and a lot of writing, the words are hints, not explicit mappings to defined meanings. You can parse an immediate meaning without knowing the context, but not the full meaning.
So it's a much harder problem. You have to learn basic grammar and vocab for tens of thousands of symbols, then learn standard basic exchanges in social situations, then special forms, idioms and social register, then implication and subtext.
Good point. Physicists even call mathematics a “language,” which obviously has no implications whatsoever as to how easy (or hard) it is for a talented polyglot to learn it.
I am not aware of strong evidence for linguistic relatively. Only some light stuff like some two words rhyme in a language so they are more likely paired in music and poetry than in other languages where they don't rhyme.
It is much more plausible that human understanding of the world has shaped language. We can expand our vocabulary for our needs. Skiers of any language likely know more words for snow than speakers of their same language who only want to hang out on the beach.
The skills that make you good at picking up your third+ natural language should be similar to the skills that make you good at picking up your third+ programming language. (With extra programming languages being much easier to pick up than extra natural languages, in my experience)
The guy might struggle with picking up programming to begin with though, it is indeed a completely different thing from human language.
> The skills that make you good at picking up your third+ natural language should be similar to the skills that make you good at picking up your third+ programming language.
The skills involved in picking up a natural language are going out and schmoozing with people who speak that language.
This is not actually a skill set that people who are good at picking up programming languages are known for.
I also am like this. I have a co-disabilities that makes it near impossible for me to pick up a second language, yet I’m fairly talented at programming and have been paid to write in at least 8 programming languages.
That's exactly why I'd be interested to see if he could pick them up too. They're much more procedural, less meaning and more grammar. It might make it easier to see what's improved in his brain.
The "if I had a penny" family of expressions dates back to a time when the monetary value of pennies was greater than the burden of carrying them around.
My natural aptitude for reading programming languages has never helped me out speaking languages. After 20 years, I still only speak 3 words of French. Inability to pronounce or hear certain phonemes is a real phenomenon.
According to the input hypothesis of language acquisition, the ability to speak is a function of how much we've already heard/read/taken in, and understood. If you're someone who enjoys reading, and you find that parsing weird syntax comes easy to you, then you're all set for learning a language with something like the refold method[1]. You just gotta put in the possibly staggering amount of hours that it takes.
