this post was submitted on 18 Feb 2026
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Asklemmy

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[โ€“] HiddenLayer555@lemmy.ml 38 points 22 hours ago* (last edited 22 hours ago) (1 children)

As an immigrant who had to learn English (and a very small amount of French) and also programming languages, programming languages are much, much easier. You don't have to deal with tenses or conjugation, you don't have to learn pronounciation rules because most things you express in programming is not directly pronouncable, there isn't a million weird syntax and spelling exceptions that you just have to memorize, and you don't have this disparity between formal and casual language. Learning technical or literary writing is even more complex.

Computer science as a whole is in my opinion more like learning a language. Once you know the fundamental concepts of computation, different programming languages are more like dialects than full languages.

[โ€“] LedgeDrop@lemmy.zip 8 points 13 hours ago

Expanding on everything you mentioned...

Programming languages must be structured (otherwise, compilers and interpreters couldn't parse them).

Natural languages try to have structure, but introduce so many exceptions, that it creates a higher cognitive load to remember (but it makes speeches/written works more interesting).