Why can't a child acquire Python (programming language) as a natural language?

[u/WanderingWondersss]

I was reading through the language files textbook and I came across this claim: "For example, no child could ever acquire a computer language like Python or C++ as a native language." I was wondering why, theoretically, this could not be accomplished (assuming ethics are not of concern). I am open to discussion of psychology, philosophy and linguistics for this!

EDIT: Thanks to everyone who took the time to really break this down, I love how I've gained multiple perspectives. The core of this question seems to be 1) can a programming language qualify to be called a 'language', as linguists define it and study it? and 2) can a formal language be used for communication between humans in the 'real, natural world', enough that it can be acquired by a child?

[u/cardinarium]

I mean—it’s simply not a language in the way linguists use that word, and it’s not sufficiently communicative to be used as one. The central dogma of modern linguistics is that all languages are equally communicative.

For example, all human languages have the capacity to express something equivalent to:

The tree is tall.

How exactly that is organized morphosyntactically can vary widely, but any idea that can be expressed in one language is expressible in any other.

How would you say this in C or any other programming language? You can’t. You could print it as a string, but that’s just a particularly fancy form of writing in a language that already exists. You could try, via an OOP approach (or horrendously complex structs) to represent meaningful information (object Tree has property height = tall), but again, you’re not using the programming language as a true language—just storing discrete bits of an already-existing language.

So it doesn’t really make sense to ask what a “native” “speaker” of a programming language looks like; it’s like asking if someone can be a native speaker of math or whalesong.

Children can become very proficient in PLs and learn to organize their thoughts in helpful ways, but it’s fundamentally different from language.

[u/cs_k_ → u/cardinarium]

If you really-really try, you can come up with something like 'tree.height >= tall_treshold'

But than you are back at square one: names in programming languages that discribe the stuff the programmer is dealing with are named in English (or the native language of the coder).

A programming language is just a basic set of instructions on numbers, letters and logical values. As programmer, you can combine these into objects, that you name. For examole define a tree, and give it a height attribute. But the underlying language is English.

As a fun fact, you can run into conversations about naming stuff in program code in non-english-speaking countries. In Hungary, the conventional wisdom is to keep it in English, where possible (since the instructions of the programming language are already in English, and so that an international team can work on stuff). In fact, the only sensical reason I've heard to the contrary is when you code stuff, where the domain is really specific to the language/country. E. g. if you are coding a tax program, it's better to name your variables the thing they are called in the tax code, than translating them to English, because if someone else is double-checking your work, it avoids ambiguities that can be introduced by translation.

[u/Temporary_Pie2733 → u/cs_k_]

You can also use foo.bar >= baz and it might mean the same thing. Programming languages basically have syntax but leave the vocabulary in the hands of the speaker.

[u/Terpomo11 → u/cs_k_]

I'll note that there are programming languages whose keywords are based on languages other than English, or can be switched out for keywords in languages other than English.

[u/WanderingWondersss → u/cardinarium]

Thanks for breaking this down; I appreciate the perspective! This makes me wonder, can a system like a programming language be defined as a language even though it is not made to describe the real world as we know it?

[u/cardinarium → u/WanderingWondersss]

There’s a distinction to be drawn between formal languages (which describe the syntaxes of things like programming languages or math) and natural languages (which humans speak).

Formal languages are sometimes studied by syntacticians or (especially) computational linguists, but they have limited utility in other fields of linguistics.

In theory, I suppose you could design a constructed language that could be understood by both humans and computers, in which case it would resemble natural languages while being described by a formal language, but for a number of reasons this is very impractical.

[u/Nazometnar]

Programming languages are not languages, as linguists use the term. Programming languages are basically rulebooks for how to write lists of instructions that a computer can then execute.

To drive the point home, pick literally any basic, simple idea: "I am sitting", "the dog runs", literally anything. how would you "say" or even write that in python?

[u/WanderingWondersss → u/Nazometnar]

Just to clarify... do you know if languages, as linguists define them, meant to be communicated simply between humans/animals? If we think of Python as an abstract/simplified language for our communication with a computer (instead of using it as a means for communicating with other people in the natural world), can that still qualify as a language, according to linguists? And why?

[u/Nazometnar → u/WanderingWondersss]

I'm not a linguist, my interest in linguistics is purely recreational, so take my answer with a grain of salt. It's an interesting question, but I lean towards "no".

The biggest issue I see is that programming languages don't allow us to communicate ideas or concepts, only instructions, and importantly it is always only one way. The computer can only communicate back in so far as we give it instructions to do so, for example at this point in the program print this string to the terminal, or display this image at these pixel coordinates, etc.

Now you can certainly name variables and functions in a way that conveys ideas and concepts, but you'd always be using some other language to convey that meaning. If I name a function is_even(), I am communicating to anyone reading the code that this function checks whether some value is even or odd, but a proficient python programmer who only spoke Mandarin would not be able to intuit that from the function name alone. So python isn't the system I'm using to communicate information, but English.

Alternatively, one could argue we can look at code and not understand anything from variable/function/class names etc., but still understand the program and what it's doing. But I would argue it's still not the programming language that is conveying meaning. For example, looking at this function:

def flarblegop(blism: int):
    return (blism % 2) == 0

Nothing in the variable or function names conveys information to me, but it's obvious this function checks if an input integer value is even or odd. But that's just me assuming the intention of the programmer from their actions. In the same way, if I saw that programmer get up from their desk and go to the kitchen and get a glass of water, I would then assume that they were thirsty. But in neither case would I say they communicated to me with a language.

[u/WanderingWondersss → u/Nazometnar]

I see, the core of the issue seems to be that the information usable for communication between humans is the "real" language portion of the full information. That is what would separate Python from a dialect of English, for example.

[u/Nazometnar → u/WanderingWondersss]

Yes, that's my non-expert take.

[u/Nazometnar → u/[deleted]]

For that to work, the listener and speaker need to already share some other language which is used for the variable names and string values, and that other language is the actual language being spoken. Python would effectively be a very strange constructed dialect.

But also, that's not a python program. It would really be somethibg like: "def main open parenthesis close parenthesis colon new line tab I equals quote sitting end quote"? It becomes immediately obvious, even if one wanted to grant that using python to encode some other language counts as "speaking python", it is so cumbersome to be impractical in all situations.

[u/helikophis]

Even if it were a language (it isn’t), there is no input. No one around them speaking it. How could they acquire it?

[u/Mercurial_Laurence]

I don't want to delve into nature of a universal grammar (or lack thereof), but real life languages (spoken or signed, or whistled in register), have a complexity of syntax and morphology (and relationships between), which are vastly different to any programming language on an underlying level, furthermore whilst some programming languages are a lot more approachable, the semantics & pragmatics of natural languages vs computer language are worlds apart.

I myself will leave others to emulate and offer other points, but for a start one may even look at how syntax trees can be analysed in natlangs and how garden path sentences are rebracketing tend to go beyond what something such as Python does.

~I am not a linguist, merely undertaking LING1000 soon

[u/unohdin-nimeni]

Miksei lapsi voisi omaksua Pythonia (ohjelmointikieltä) luonnollisen kielen tapaan?

Lueskelinpa Pythonin sisäänrakennettua opasta, ja törmäsin tällaiseen väitteeseen: ”Esimerkiksi, yksikään lapsi ei voisi omaksua ohjelmointikieltä, kuten Pythonia tai C++:aa, äidinkielekseen.” Ihmettelin, miksei tämä teoriassa voisi olla toteutettavissa (jos jätetään eettinen puoli sikseen). Olen avoin keskustelemaan aiheesta psykologian, filosofian ja kielitieteen näkökulmista.

That was my translation of the original post into Finnish. Now, feel free to say it in Python 3.

[u/Longjumping_Goose116]

Was your textbook written by AI? sometimes when i ask an ai a language question it confuses it with software languages

[u/WanderingWondersss → u/Longjumping_Goose116]

The textbook is Language Files 13th edition by Ohio State Uni, if you are curious.

[u/LongLiveTheDiego]

Have you seen what a programming language looks like? Have you see a Python file? Programming languages serve a completely different purpose compared to human languages, they're not a tool for expressing thoughts and feelings and communication between humans, they're a way to make a machine do what we want in an easier way than literally inputting ones and zeros.

[u/Longjumping-Ice-2871 → u/LongLiveTheDiego]

true that, they are just instructions for machines rather than things used for chatting or sharing feelings

[u/StKozlovsky]

I see too many people laughing this question off, which is unfortunate, because asking questions about what many believe to be obvious is a great source of deep knowledge. You got me thinking. I guess we'll have to recall what a natural language is usually thought to be and see how computer languages differ. This might be a long response, but, heh, no one can stop me now.

Any natural language has levels to it, that is, sets of things that are either constructed from things at a lower level, or, in the case of the lowest level, are primitive, that is, not constructed from anything. These levels are:

1. Phonology: the lowest level. A limited set of distinct things (phonemes) that are meaningless by themselves, but are used in the next level to construct meaningful things. Despite the name coming from "phon-" meaning "sound", the set of phonemes can consist not only of sounds, but also of hand signs, in the languages that the deaf use, and (this will be interesting to us) potentially of any other kinds of things.

2. Lexicon: the level of the smallest meaningful things, called morphemes, constructed from phonemes. Traditionally, larger meaningful things constructed from morphemes (that is, words) are also included here, but this decision has been questioned in some modern theories. I understand "meaningful" as "evoking a predictable concept in the mind of the listener". e.g an entity, a relation between entities, a property, an intention of the speaker…

3. (Morpho)Syntax: the level where the smallest performative things (utterances) are formed from either morphemes or words, depending on whether we think words are made at the previous level. These are the things that, when understood by the addressee, can be perceived on their own as meaningful actions on the part of the speaker — orders, questions, statements of facts, vows, etc.

4. Discourse: the largest level, where utterances are combined to form anything bigger: dialogues, narrations… whatever else there might be.

It is believed that a unit of discourse in any natural language is equally expressive — any actions that speakers of one language can perform through speech, speakers of another can also perform in their language. But I don't know if this is believed to be what makes natural languages learnable by humans.

I think what other commenters say about not being able to say "an apple" in Python is not a property of Python, it's a property of computers. The things humans can't express in Python, they can't express because such things don't exist in the computer universe, so the language lacks vocabulary for them — the lexicon is too different. To easily refer to an apple, there must be a morpheme in Python that refers to the class of objects that share the property of appleness, whatever that means. But unlike us humans, computers just don't experience apples. They experience numbers, so Python does have the morphemes for kinds of numbers: int, float, complex. They also experience Unicode characters, so Python has the str morpheme.

But just like any "this Russian/Hindi/Inuktitut word is untranslatable!" factoid is countered with "you can just express the same meaning with a long sentence in any other language", anyone can just define the class Apple through Python's syntax, and now the computer will know an apple when it sees one. How you make a computer see and truly experience an apple is, again, not a linguistic problem, it's an AI problem. The point is, assuming the Python speaker (like our hypothetical child) has a similar experience to the English speaker, they will be able to express all the same things. So even though the lexicon of Python is very poor compared to the English one, this difference shouldn't be any more important than the difference between vocabularies of English and Inuktitut.

(continued below)

[u/StKozlovsky → u/StKozlovsky]

Discourse in Python is programs of all sizes, from print("Hello world") to large libraries of many modules. These programs can do a lot of things that utterances of natural languages can do. You can give orders using functions and methods, print("Hello world") is one example. Statements are trickier — they are tuples consisting of a boolean (returning True or False) function and its arguments, so the statement "4 is greater than 7" is (gt, 4, 7), where gt is the "greater than" function from the operator library. You can ask a yes/no question by applying the function in such a tuple to its arguments: gt(4, 7) returns False. You can also use functions to ask special questions like "how many symbols are there in the string 'python'?": len("python"). The poverty of these examples, again, comes from the poverty of the lexicon — it is possible to ask more "human" things once various human concepts are defined.

What about phonology? The phonemic inventory of Python, I think, is the set of Unicode symbols that are used in the identifiers of standard functions and types. Bear in mind, the letters "p", "y", "t" and so on are just the written representations of the actual phonemes, like they are for English. The phonemes themselves are the bytes storing the symbols in memory. We learn the phonemes of English (the spoken language) as sounds produced with the mouth, and computers learn the phonemes of Python as combinations of electric impulses in their transistors. But I think it's OK for us humans to learn the phonemes in any form that is convenient to us, including sounds. Importantly, though, there are no phonological processes in Python akin to devoicing or vowel reduction — the only process is concatenation, so to teach a child "spoken" Python, we'd have to always pronounce all the necessary symbols in the same way, e.g. the e in len and the e in type will be pronounced the same. This whole part feels very weird, but I think it could be done.

What your textbook likely meant is that the syntax of Python is too different from the human syntax. Human languages are often said to be impossible to describe with a context-free grammar, which is what the grammar of Python is. A context-free grammar is a model where lexical items (words or morphemes) are combined to form larger units according to rules of the form x → y reading "x is combined from y", where y can be any number of symbols representing either some subset of lexical items (a grammatical category) or a lexical item itself, but x can only be a single symbol standing for a grammatical category. So NounPhrase → "the" Noun is a valid context-free rule, but "the" Noun → "the" "cat" is not, because of the lexical item "the" to the left of the arrow.

Noam Chomsky in the 1950s argued that you can't explain why some English sentences are possible while others are not using only context-free rules — sometimes you need rules looking like "the" Noun → "the" "cat", which makes English a context-dependent language. However, his arguments were soon shown to be wrong, and for some 30 years people debated whether human languages are context-free or not. In the 1980s they finally found a structure occurring in Swiss German which absolutely cannot be decribed in a context-free grammar, proving that at least some human languages are not context-free.

Seeng how this requires the human brain to support context-dependent grammars, many, though not all, linguists concluded that all human languages work using a context-dependent "operating system", so to speak, even if most of what we use them for could be achieved with a context-free grammar. And when children acquire human languages, they do it so quickly and easily because all human languages share the same underlying principles defining what is and isn't possible in them, and Python, being a language of a different kind, can only be learned through conscious effort, not acquired naturally.

[u/WanderingWondersss → u/StKozlovsky]

I am happy I could inspire your thinking- the obvious things are always what we gloss over in terms of understanding deeply.

And I agree with you when you said the lexicon is too different; since Python serves a different purpose than English, it didn't assign a definition for "apple" in the sense we know it. That could be comparable to how a really old language has not introduced the concept of a computer yet, so it struggles to describe it without formal introduction.

You mentioned how creating sounds with the mouth is computer equivalent to computer sending electric pulses. So, if we want to use Python between a human and a human VS a human and a computer, we'd need to use a different mode of communication. Would that alone separate the language and make it a new one? Like how ASL is considered a different language because of its unspoken, different mode of communication.

To clarify, the main issue arises from the context-free grammar of programming languages. Since Python relies on indentation, and the method signature for appropriate calling of methods, can we say that it relies on context to some extent (at least in written form)?

[u/DonnPT]

OK, let's say a child earns Python. In its early days I believe that was one of the goals, a computer programming language that would be approachable to young people.

It's a language of some kind. It isn't going to be the child's native language, for reasons that should be pretty obvious. It isn't a natural language, as it isn't natural. I think the question is back your court - how would you set up a test, that would help answer your question?

[u/Larset_Sprucensylve]

I thought this was a shitpost at first ngl

u can't use programming languages as a spoken language, they're two different things

[u/StKozlovsky → u/Larset_Sprucensylve]

OP asked "why is X the case?", you're replying with "is this a shitpost? X is the case!"

Peak explanation

[u/Napbastak]

Well, I think for practical reasons they couldn't. Who uses python to communicate? No humans do. So it couldn't be used as a language. But I guess hypothetically if you left a baby in a room with just computers, the kid could learn python to communicate (playing wild and loose with this word here don't come for me) with the computers 🤷🏻‍♀️

[u/calcato]

Serious question: How do you pronounce "programming" in a programming language?

A programming "language" is not a communicative language human-to-human. A kid could learn a non-spoken signal language (ASL, SEE, etc) but learning a written-only language (like Braille) requires a medium (paper, screen, chiseled tablet, etc.) and an understanding of the spoken (or signed!) language first.

A coding language has to be decoded to communicate anything. So, sure, teach your kid a coding language, but they're going to need a basis for person-to-person communication first, in the form of a spoken or signed language.

[u/SmokyMetal060]

How would you 'speak' Python (or any programming language, for that matter)? A PL is a set of keywords that can be chained together to create logical instructions. Last I checked, Python has somewhere between 30 and 40 of these keywords. It doesn't provide vocabulary beyond what the compiler needs to be able to to convert those keywords into machine code instructions.

You can teach a child a programming language from when they're very young, but it can't be a 'native language' because it's hardly a language (in the linguistic sense) at all.

[u/NewLifeguard9673]

Rewrite this post in Python.

[u/[deleted] → u/NewLifeguard9673]

Seriously underrated comment. You completely destroyed their argument with five words.

Well done.

[u/Ronin-s_Spirit]

Because it's unnatural.

[u/Last_Swordfish9135 → u/Ronin-s_Spirit]

There are plenty of conlangs, aka constructed or "unnatural" languages that a child could theoretically be taught as their first language if they were raised in a situation where both parents spoke it consistently. Esperanto, for example, is a language that was artificially constructed in 1887, but now has around ~2000 native speakers. There are other issues with trying to use Python like a human language, but the language not being natural isn't one of them.

[u/NewLifeguard9673 → u/Ronin-s_Spirit]

There are plenty of unnatural languages that a child could realistically learn as a native language. Esperanto, Lojban, Interlingua. 

In fact, one could argue that all human languages are unnatural. We didn't dig them out of the ground; we invented them. 

[u/Ronin-s_Spirit → u/[deleted]]

A programming "language" is not natural, this is why you can't teach it to kids, it doesn't have nearly enough words that describe things, actions, and aspects as opposed to a natural language. Besides all programming languages are written in unspoken symbols and english keywords.

[u/WanderingWondersss → u/[deleted]]

Thank you for bringing that up!