On The Question Of Language. Copyright :- Rajdeep Bhattacharya.

On The Question Of Language…….

Rajdeep Bhattacharya
2 min readJun 23, 2024

There are Natural Languages like English, Spanish, Chinese, Hindi, etc. developed and evolved over centuries. Most of them have their own script which also evolved alongside them.

There are Constructed Languages or Conlangs (Artificial Languages, Fictional Languages, Programming Languages, etc) like Lingua Ignota, etc.

And then there are Programming Languages like C, Fortran, C++, Java, Python, etc. constructed for programming purposes.

Different Codes And Cyphers.

You learn the Natural Languages either by social interaction (from birth, with family, friends, etc.) or you acquire it by learning and practice like a French Language Course, etc.

The Conglangs are highly specific purpose wise, they are constructed for various reasons like for a novel, for a research, etc. So if you are not into a particular domain you won’t need to learn one.

A sub set of Conglangs — the Programming Languages can only be acquired by learning and practice.

The fun part is that programmers feel that programming languages are hard to learn, but in reality they are much much well structured and syntaxed than Natural Languages or Conglangs. The Natural Languages give much more emphasis on context.

To be simply put if we think of the above three types in terms of syntax and context :-

Natural Lnguages — 60% Syntax and 40% Context.

Conglangs — Varies highly from one Conglang to another Conglang, depends on the purpose of construction.

Programming Languages — 99% Syntax.

The Syntax part and the Context part always are not mutually exclusive while doing the above assumption.

The Programming Languages feel hard to learn as they are distant from the daily uses that we require a language for.

In a way if we realise this it will make learning the Programming Languages much much easier.

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Rajdeep Bhattacharya
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Technology enthusiast, searching for knowledge on the edges of this age.