Even when some people wish they would

I'm old enough to remember COBOL. I even learned some of it in the dim dark past Along with RPG and FORTRAN, though I don't remember any now.

I made a point, when I was still a student, of writing exactly one program in COBOL. It was not painless. I also wrote a few programs in other now-defunct languages. There was a great short story in an old edition of some generic computer magazine ("Datamation", perhaps?). The story was called "Privacy and the Gray Haired Programmer." Anyway, it was about this old guy who was being forced into retirement by younger bosses who considered him obsolete. He goes back to his office and issues a single query of the computer that corrupts the entire database. Nobody can fix it, but him. A few weeks later, his notice has been revoked and his boss has gotten Das Boot. He didn't put in the bugs. He simply found them and noted them. Whenever the issue of his forced retirement would arise, he'd make another query.
I'd sure love to find that story. Wish I could remember where I read it.

Hell, I am so old I remember writing a simple program in Basic

My first programs were in BASIC on a pdp8/e (marketed as EDUSYSTEM 25). Nowadays I still write some of my programs in VB and VBA (Visual Basic and Visual Basic for Applications). The development of BASIC was a seminal event in computing. It served a very different role than COBOL or FORTRAN.

FORTRAN = Formula Translation = computer language for solving problems in engineering and science.

COBOL = COmmon Business Oriented Language = computer language for solving business oriented problems (banking, finance, etc.)

BASIC = Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code = language conceived as a very simple way to get people computing who did not have advanced degrees in math or engineering.

Each of these is a "General Purpose Programming Language." In theory, a program written in any of them could be rewritten using the other languages. In practice, each of them has certain kinds of things that they are adapted to. Early versions of FORTRAN had very primitive ways of handling text data, but often came with extensive libraries for doing statistics and scientific computation. BASIC was passably good at many things and was easy to use. Since early versions were interpreted (instead of compiled), it was easy to get into a development rhythm, but the code executed much more slowly. COBOL was an inherently good security mechanism as most hackers would not spend two seconds trying to figure it out - and would not brag about it, if they did.

pdp8/e

This was the second computer I used in '73 or so in the math department at a local community college. Shortly before, I had gone to the Lawrence Hall of Science to use their (first model) HP 3000. I mainly used BASIC on both of them. BASIC was developed at Dartmouth in the mid-60s. FORTRAN was developed in the mid-50s by IBM. COBOL, also from IBM, was from the late '50s. One language also from '59 or so that is still in serious use around the world is LISP. Though most of my coding these days is in Java, I still prefer Common Lisp (the ANSI standard): a beautiful, elegant, and well-designed language. All other programming languages have been trying to get where Lisp was 40 years ago.

or 50 years -- time flies like a programming language.

-joe ('58 was a good year) friday

I've written a few programs in LISP, the most complicated being a theorem-prover (for an AI course), but I've never used it on the job. (Other than some trivial stuff in emacs, which I no longer use.)

I don't know much about any of these but I did enjoy reading the geek artillery barrages in the comments on that article.

I've been wondering, does the learning of a computer programming language feel like it is intensively using the brain region(s) intensively used in learning linguistics? We learn a great deal about spoken and written language before even considering studying a computer programming language, so determining from personal experience, without scientific experimentation or observation, whether linguistics aptitude and computer programming aptitude coincide at their neurological basis or bases may be difficult or impossible.

There may some day be multi-color images of brain activity during every conceivable type of learning, and the likes of me won't need to ask questions like the one I just asked.

I might could phrase the above better—and I may try—but I don't know that I could change it much for better or worse. Let's see; there are programmers about; which one should I lay this on. Actually, anyone who finds anything in what I've said to address may do so, with no need of my permission.

It's interesting. This is an empirical question that we clearly have the technology to answer. Whether anyone has actually done it, I could not tell you - but it's very clear that this could be done - at least in a physical-structural sense.

I've been wondering, does the learning of a computer programming language feel like it is intensively using the brain region(s) intensively used in learning linguistics?

Do you mean learning a language or learning linguistics? They are two different things. I know that some universities in the States have allowed a programming language to be substituted for one of the two languages required in many PhD programs. The evolution of computer science has benefited from some linguistics, and there is a branch of computational linguistics, but programming languages, while superficially resembling natural languages, are really quite different from them. You could say (using modern (object-oriented programming) terminology that objects (instances of classes) are like nouns, they have properties (state) which can predicated (kind of like adjectives), and they have methods (functions, subroutines) which are like verbs. Two big differences between programming languages and natural ones is that there is no ambiguity in the former (i.e., there is only one way to parse a statement (sentence)) and the verbal systems only has one mood (imperative) and one person (the second). There are some programming languages that are not procedural (imperative) such as Lisp and Haskell (functional) and Prolog (declarative), but these higher level languages all get translated into machine language which is imperative. I'd say the similarities are superficial and that programming languages are like some animal systems of communication, that is not really language except in a metaphoric way. (For the record, I have studied both linguistics and computer science and have taught both natural and programming languages (Latin, Pascal, Java, C, and C++.)

I think I'd agree with all that, however, I'd say the likelihood of whether the same parts of the brain are used as in learning language would probably increase the higher the level of the computer 'language'. (Was that a sentence, I can't tell anymore it's so late. Who cares?) With low level languages nearer to the machine code end of the spectrum, I imagine it would be mostly the same parts that are used in engaging with mathematical things, rather than with verbal things. With higher level languages such as some recent gaming languages, etc, they are much more like human speech.

i knit.. and knitting, is the closest thing i know to computer (code)

in knitting there is 1 stitch, (viewed one way, its called a knit,(0) but the same stitch, viewed from the other side is called a purl (1)

all stitch patterns are based on how the stitch is viewed.

(and like a computer, when i knit, i process each stitch..when i design, i plan the code, and then work the code.

some processes in knitting closely resemble computer actions..

like multiplication. in a computer (assembly language)
the contents of a register are saved, (2, 4, 8, 16 bits) then the next set of 'bits' are worked,
then the contents of saved bits are worked.

in knitting, some stitches are placed on a cable needle,
then some stitches are worked
then the stitches from the cable needle are worked

there are lots of other commonalities.. See Hex and Bin meet my friends Knit and Purl, for example

Knitting and computer science (and math) all work together..

also see the home of mathematical knitting..
i could post a dozen other links.. a lot of knitters are also computer (and math, and science) nerds.

Interestingly, knitting can be done one of two ways, American (?) or European style. I can do both, but at the time I was most interested in knitting, someone taught me in European and that is what I prefer. I find it more efficient, and less taxing, with condensed movement. They do not produce knitting which is exactly the same, but close enough that most people cannot tell the difference.

The first computer thing I did was my first year of college and we used a stack of punch cards. Is there a particular language associated with this? How horribly did I just date myself? Can anyone correctly guess what year was my first in college?

I don't care what you say, Pook, to me "tamal" is the only singular form of "tamales", no matter the language. nyeh nyeh... ;0)

You're right to point out that learning a language and learning linguistics aren't one and the same.

I used RPG (Report Program Generator) on punch cards in about 1978.

@ twosleepy: Punch cards were just an input medium. One can no more tell what language you were using then one could if you had said you used a USB keyboard. My favorite punch card story is of the time I was filling in for the operators in the computer room and I fed a stack of punch cards into the reader without putting the weight in the output bin. My reaction times have always been pretty good so there were only about 100 or so cards spewed all over the floor after I hit the stop button. Fortunately the programmer had been smart enough to use sequential numbers in the first columns of the punch cards so all he had to do was read them in as pure data, sort by the first columns, and re-punch the resulting file.

@ ledasdottir: If knits are zeroes and purls are ones why is it called knitting? It should be called purling. Or either that or knits are ones, one.

we used a stack of punch cards.

I never used punch cards. On the first computers I used, the HP-3000 and the PDP-8/e, though the latter did have a card reader attached, were time-sharing and had multiple ASR-33 teletypes (image) for I/O. I also saved my programs on paper tape.

While punched cards (to control looms) date from around the early 19th century, punch card readers date from the late 19th century, pre-dating modern, digital computers by about 50 years. Herman Hollerith, who founded the company now known as IBM, sold the first readers to the US government to help tabulate data from the 1890 census. (You can see some great pictures here and read more about it.) IBM sold tabulating equipment to a lot of different governments including the Third Reich in Germany (link).

I started with paper tape in HS. I may still have a piece. In college, we started with punch cards. I still have my first JCL card I used to submit jobs with. I keep it at work. I've considered several times getting it framed.

BTW, I have also taught computer languages: Pascal, BASIC, Advanced Fortran, PL/I, and assembler. I never knew any human languages well enough to teach them. I think learning other languages has helped me understand English better. I can say that learning programming languages has help my English, but I think it has helped me develop analytic abilities - and I suspect some kinds of writing use similar analytic capabilities. They really should do some brain scans of people performing these tasks - novices, as well as experts.

since this thread is about languages and geekstuff this pun might appeal to some here:
UserFriendly

That should be "I can't say ..."

There's no past tense in computer languages.

There's no past tense in computer languages.

There is no tense in them either. Nor aspect.

Ah yes, drag and drop (“dragon drop”). Fortunately it can often be done with no highlighting by the user necessary, as when moving an icon or a bookmark. When it comes to copy and paste and cut and paste, I sometimes spend more time time trying to highlight a short multi-line passage of text than it would have taken to type it out, it seems. See? GUIs spoil us, and may make quibblers of us all.