Both. They’re not particularly related or similar. But through naming, comments, and docs they’re connected for a common means.

I enjoy formulating in a concise, precise way. I like wordplay. I’m interested in different human languages. I’m familiar with several “computer” languages.

Languages encode meaning. Data formats, specifications and descriptions formalize rules. Human languages have rules too, but they are much more dynamic, diffuse and changing.

That’s interesting, they’re two of my biggest interests. I wonder if this is true for a lot of other people.

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.

I have interest in both types, but it is not like they are correlated. Computer languages are more logical and human languages are more abstract.

I write code in a bunch of different languages without breaking a sweat, but the human spoken language has always been a mystery to me. I can barely handle one language, I’ve tried learning two others and failed miserably except for a very small handful of words.