[SIGCIS-Members] Origin of 'language'?

Nabeel Siddiqui nasiddiqui at email.wm.edu
Wed Nov 5 15:57:22 PST 2014


For what its worth, I believe that by the early 1980s, most computer
hobbyists and journalists viewed their practices as an extension of Grace
Hopper's work—although it may be worth checking out the discourses
surrounding the IBM Card Programmed Calculator.   If interested, 80 Micro
had an article in early 1983:
https://ia801705.us.archive.org/23/items/80_Micro_1983-07_1001001_US/80_Micro_1983-07_1001001_US.pdf

As a result, although there are earlier examples—Ada Lovelace as Bill
pointed out and philosophical language as David pointed out—I don't believe
they had a significant impact on how computer programmers saw themselves.

On Wed, Nov 5, 2014 at 3:35 PM, David Golumbia <dgolumbia at gmail.com> wrote:

> I could write a lot on the topic (and hopefully will some day), and have
> written a bit already (in particular my essay "Death of a Discipline" in
> the spring 2014 issue of *differences*, there regarding the Digital
> Humanities) but basically it's contentious because it suggests that there
> is some set of practices/systems called "languages" that includes "natural"
> languages, programming languages, and/or formal languages, and that this
> category called "language" is one about which generalizations can and
> should be made. Outside of some very abstract ones, however, that just
> isn't true, and those generalizations that are true tend to be
> characteristics of formal or programming languages that were designed to be
> like natural languages, and appear a fortiori in (some, or possibly all)
> natural languages.
>
> It is culturally contentious because it leads to the widespread and
> mistaken view that "programming languages" and "natural languages" are the
> same kinds of thing, which I believe is demonstrably and utterly wrong. One
> piece of social evidence for its being incorrect (which I hope any
> linguists on the list will feel free to weigh in on, but as I dabble in
> linguistics a bit it is a generalization I am fairly certain about) is that
> we have a field that studies what it generally calls "language," namely
> linguistics, and that field requires its scholars to become experts in a
> language, and that is always a human language. So specialists who use the
> naked term "language" *always *mean what we mean by "natural language."
> So far as I know, nobody has yet gotten a PhD in Linguistics where their
> specialty was Ruby on Rails, and I hope it remains that way and believe it
> will, though at this point one never knows. In part this is because
> linguists have some nice criteria for what qualifies as a "language," and
> programming & formal languages lack many of the most important
> characteristics. That's why in scholarly lists of languages, only "natural"
> languages appear (one of the most widely-cited and authoritative of these
> lists is the *Ethnologue*: http://www.ethnologue.com/browse).
>
> Yet we see everywhere a great deal of evidence that many, particularly
> those strongly identified with computers, believe in the existence of this
> super-category, often suggesting, for example, that students should learn
> programming languages instead of or as a reasonable substitute for learning
> natural languages. They are just different sorts of things entirely. The
> argument whether students should learn to program is a separate argument
> from whether they should learn foreign languages (at least in so far as any
> such pedagogical questions can be separated). And note that there is a
> political-cultural dimension here as well: it is always (at least in my
> experience) computer advocates wanting to claim that programming languages
> "are" languages, and never the other way around (ie, not linguists wanting
> to claim that programming languages are the same kind of thing they study:
> which is not to say they don't have linguistic features, as of course they
> are designed to do, but that "hey, those programming languages are
> languages too" is a claim that only emerges in one direction).
>
> as long as I'm writing, I greatly appreciate Pierre's citation of the
> recent D. Nofre, M. Priestley, & G. Alberts paper. I had not run across
> that yet and, on quick glance, it looks like both an excellent analysis and
> to be an invaluable source of information, and adds a great deal of context
> to what I mentioned metonymically as the work of Grace Hopper and "others."
>
> David
>
> On Wed, Nov 5, 2014 at 2:14 PM, Fishwick, Paul <Paul.Fishwick at utdallas.edu
> > wrote:
>
>> David:
>>   I’d like to better understand your argument here:
>>
>>  " almost immediately, people started construing these constructions as
>> some
>>   artificial meta-category called "language," despite this being an
>> incredibly
>>   contentious (and basically entirely inaccurate) way of construing
>> things.
>>   Chomsky's 1950s papers on context-free grammars did not help things.”
>>
>>  Why is this contentious in your opinion? Regarding language, The work of
>> Pierce
>> and de Saussure (semiology, semiotics) may also be relevant to the
>> discussion on
>> language.
>> -paul
>>
>>
>>
>> Paul Fishwick, PhD
>> Chair, ACM SIGSIM
>> Distinguished University Chair of Arts & Technology
>>    and Professor of Computer Science
>> Director, Creative Automata Laboratory
>> The University of Texas at Dallas
>> Arts & Technology
>> 800 West Campbell Road, AT10
>> Richardson, TX 75080-3021
>> Home: utdallas.edu/atec/fishwick<http://utdallas.edu/atec/fishwick>
>> Blog: creative-automata.com<http://creative-automata.com>
>>
>> On Nov 5, 2014, at 10:59 AM, David Golumbia <dgolumbia at gmail.com<mailto:
>> dgolumbia at gmail.com>> wrote:
>>
>> t has two sources.
>>
>> first, the use of "formal language" in logic and philosophy of language
>> in the work of Gottlob Frege in the late 19c/early 20c. Frege was clear
>> that the "formal languages" he developed were not like human languages, but
>> they have nevertheless sometimes been construed this way (although not
>> usually by philosophers and logicians).
>>
>> second, from work in the late 1940s and early 1950s by Grace Hopper,
>> others at the Navy, and some in academia (particularly Harvard and MIT) to
>> make what were then called "computer codes" and basically required
>> high-level knowledge of mathematics, easier to use, and also compilers to
>> automatically turn these new forms (including well-known PLs like COBOL and
>> FORTRAN) into machine code. They called these "programming languages" in
>> part to distinguish them from "computer codes" and because they used
>> elements of natural language in their construction. almost immediately,
>> people started construing these constructions as some artificial
>> meta-category called "language," despite this being an incredibly
>> contentious (and basically entirely inaccurate) way of construing things.
>> Chomsky's 1950s papers on context-free grammars did not help things.
>>
>> Have some work-in-progress on this topic as it's a particular pet peeve
>> of mine, but at this point pretty far back on the backburner (if anyone
>> wants to contribute please drop me a line, as I'm very interested in making
>> it a group project).
>>
>> David
>>
>> 2014-11-05 4:13 GMT-05:00 Marie Gevers <marie.gevers at unamur.be<mailto:
>> marie.gevers at unamur.be>>:
>> I wonder by whom and when the word 'language' was used for the first time
>> in the framework of computer sciences.
>> Can anybody enlighten me?
>> Thanks in advance.
>>
>> Marie
>> --
>> <edifghaf.png>
>>
>> Prof. Marie d'UDEKEM-GEVERS
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>>
>> http://www.academieroyale.be/cgi?usr=bb58g68qxq&lg=fr&pag=919&tab=111&rec=513&frm=368&par=secorig1018&id=5337&flux=83265846
>>
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>> --
>> David Golumbia
>> dgolumbia at gmail.com<mailto:dgolumbia at gmail.com>
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>
>
> --
> David Golumbia
> dgolumbia at gmail.com
>
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