CP4E was Re: Deitel and Deitel Book...

[Simon Brunning]

> From:	Geoff Gerrietts [SMTP:geoff at gerrietts.net]
> For the space of around three years, a child is immersed almost
> constantly, from waking to sleep, and even sometimes while asleep, in
> language. For those first three years, the child is almost completely
> incapable of making him or herself understood.
 
You don't have kids, do you?

Children are able to make themselves understood to some extent by a year or
so, well in advance of their use of grammatical constriction.

Soon after that, they start to put words together into proto-sentences.
Again, they are understood. This is at least partly because patents make an
effort to understand malformed sentences. Computers don't do this!
(Interestingly, though children miss parts of sentences out at this age, and
for some time to come, they usually get those parts of the sentence that
they do use in the correct order. Stephen Pinker's 'The Language Instinct'
is a *facinating* read if you find this sort of thing even remotely
interesting - I cannot recommend it too highly.)

It seems to me that there are two differences between natural languages and
computer languages. Firstly, all children are natural geniuses with natural
language. Secondly, when using a natural language imperfectly, one can still
make oneself understood. (I certainly hope so, for my sake!) This isn't the
case with computer languages.

So I don't think that computer languages can be learned in the same way as
natural languages. Children learn language by a combination of instinct and
trial-and-error. We don't *have* a computer language instinct - only Guido
has one of those - and trial-and-error will just mean
trial-and-syntax-error.

Cheers,
Simon Brunning
TriSystems Ltd.
sbrunning at trisystems.co.uk




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