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++.)
