Thread by @sqiouyilu

most programming languages are conlangs that use english orthography to create ideograms

I always wondered how non-anglophones program if programming languages are represented in english—except they’re actually not, they’re independent languages that use english as a constant, but are actually more like math notation, meaning anyone can use it regardless of language

me, with an academic background in World Englishes and english as a global auxlang, coming to a unified theory of programming languages as conlangs

conlang: a constructed language, functional as soon as it can both generate and iterate

programming language: a conlang that uses an auxlang instead of its own nonce lexicon

ergo the programming principle of it not being a language until you can say “Hello World”

the value is not in saying the specific terms “Hello World”; that’s simply a lexical placeholder that can only be decoded once there has been an encoding (the language)

if you are attempting to conlang by building a lexicon and/or individual rules, you are not building a conlang, you are building either a lexicon, or a grammar

the step that takes a lexicon and grammar to a language is the GENERATIVE component, which must understand iteration

iteration at its most basic component means you must be able to perform x = f(x)

i.e., the universal set, which is a set that contains everything, including itself

the linguistic difference between animals and humans is that humans can conceptualize iteration

animals that we describe as having “language” have some degree of understanding iteration, which is represented by “can this animal use a tool”

because “tool” means “has iterated at least once to find a solution”

me, suddenly pulling in my recollection of the Origin of Language class I took, taught jointly by the pidgins & creoles sociolinguist who oversaw my independent World Englishes thesis on Singlish, and the phonetician who taught me Perl

everyone else in the class: so you’re saying we can’t definitively explain the origin of human language. hmm. pointless class

me, a decade later: hang on, no, that’s not what the class was about. the class was about “what are the minimal requirements to originate a language”

also, I kept falling asleep in semantics but delivered a paper that noticeably impressed my rather stoic professor, and I think that was because I followed set theory very intuitively but began to lose focus as soon as lambda calculus was introduced into that theory

now I’m realizing the reason why I couldn’t relate to and nearly broke the lambda calculus we were studying by applying it to chinese is because it’s the generative component, which was derived from a non-analytic language, which is not how language is represented in my brain

it is fascinating to discover by performing thought experiments on myself that my first language is STILL chinese, bc that is the one that generated my underlying grammar, and when it was taken from me when I was a child, only lexicon and grammar were taken, not generation

I may be most fluent in english, but my OS is still chinese

this is a theory I needed to discover to figure out how my protagonist protects languages from genocide

the crux is that genocidal leaders don’t understand that “culture” is not the markers and output, it is the programming, which can’t be destroyed

#RazingBabel