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Do you speak computer and human? (lemmy.ml)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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I've observed a connection between lovers of computer languages, and lovers of human languages.

If you are interested in coding or linguistics, are you interested in both or just one of of the two? If only one interests you, which one and why? If both interest you, do they seem related to one another?

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I'm interested in programming language theory but not as much in linguistics. There is some interesting overlap though. I think I like PLT because it is prescriptive, unambiguous and clear; whereas linguistics is an attempt to describe natural language, but has areas that are ambiguous and less clear (invisible green dragons sleep furiously, for one). This impedence mismatch is probably why natural language processing is such a difficult problem in computer science and why we tend to rely on AI for it.

Chomsky's work in linguistics and grammars was incredibly important for computational parsing, be it source code or anything else. The Chomsky hierarchy (depicted and linked below) is important for developers writing parsers to know, because each category of grammar has different performance characteristics.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Chomsky's work was seminal both for linguistics (generative models) as well as formal language theory in computer science. I'm a software developer but I've a second degree in translation and I studied Chomsky in both cases 🤣🤣🤣