The Conversation – David Arbesú
“Still, anything a computer can “learn,” it will learn. And it’s safe to assume that any finite set of data (like every single work of literature ever written) will eventually make its way into the cloud. So why not log all the rules by which languages govern themselves? Simply put: because this is not how languages work. Even if the Florida State Senate has recently ruled that studying computer code is equivalent to learning a foreign language, the two could not be more different. Programming is a constructed, formal language. Italian, Russian or Chinese—to name a few of the estimated 7,000 languages in the world—are natural, breathing languages which rely as much on social convention as on syntactic, phonetic or semantic rules.”(more)