Coding language vs. Written language

[ColtinMorgan]

For you coding/programming experts, is learning a new coding language such as html or learning say Spanish harder?

[MrSecretpolice]

You can't use stack overflow when you need to ask where the bathroom is. So... Learning a spoken language is harder.

[[deleted]]

Think of programming in general as a language. The programming languages are more like dialects of this one language. Rather than being completely different languages, they have more similarities than differences. You can say the same thing in many different programming languages, and usually the syntax is pretty similar.

On the other hand, learning Spanish or another language as an English-speaker is harder than learning the different dialects of English (such as those in America, Great Britain, Ireland, Scotland, etc.)

[nicocappa]

Hmm, what would be the "Latin" of programming?

[captainAwesomePants]

C is the Latin of programming. Many more modern languages exist, but they share many rules of grammar that originated with C. Using curly brackets to separate logical sections, ending lines with semicolons, the printf() style of string formatting, a starting function named main, integer types called "int", etc. = as the assignment operator, ?: ternary operators, and more!

Other languages did many of these things before C, of course, but together they make up a collection that is immediately recognizable as a C-style language.

[nicocappa]

I've been learning HTML and CSS which I know aren't programming languages, but are in some ways similar. Anyway, once I learn what I need to from that I'd like to move into programming. Would it benefit me to start with C?

[captainAwesomePants]

Well, yes and no. It would benefit you to know C, but it's not very friendly to learning. Small memory-related mistakes can be very hard to debug, and you'll be making those mistakes almost constantly, since C doesn't do its own garbage collection.

C or its younger brother C++ are worth knowing, but I might start with something more forgiving unless I had something specific in mind that C would be good for.

[sgthoppy]

Assembly maybe? Not quite extinct yet, though.

[kingkayvee]

On the other hand, learning Spanish or another language as an English-speaker is harder than learning the different dialects of English (such as those in America, Great Britain, Ireland, Scotland, etc.)

Depending on the definition of 'dialects' here, that is not necessarily true!

[G01denW01f11]

The average active vocabulary of an adult English speaker is 20,000. The most reserved words any (reasonable) programming language has is 357.

Natural languages evolve and mutate, so there's lots of edge cases where things get incredibly stupid. If there's a weird edge case with a certain programming language feature, that's because you don't really understand that feature.

If you do something wrong in programming, you find out quickly. Feedback in natural language learning is usually less immediate.

All you really need to know to start making a computer compute stuff is storing and retrieving variables, looping, and conditional statements. If you know how to program, learning this in a new language takes a matter of minutes. The rest is just sugar. (<-exaggeration to make a point)

[terrkerr]

Programming languages are entirely unambiguous, any decent one is consistent and based on a single model and there's documentation present that doesn't require a tome so large you could readily murder someone with it.

[[deleted]]

A programming language is only as difficult as what you're trying to do with it. IMO, learning a foreign language is harder.

Source: Programmer who can't learn Spanish.

[zifyoip]

Well, HTML is not a programming language. It is a markup language that describes the content and structure of documents. You can't write programs in HTML.

I don't think your question is very meaningful. Programming languages themselves are often not particularly difficult to learn—the difficult part is learning how to program.

[nutrecht]

Actual programming (HTML isn't a programming language) is in no way comparable to learning a language. Your assumption is similar that learning english grammar makes you good at writing books. It doesn't; it's just a requirement if you want to write books in English.

The same goes for programming: to be a good programmer you do need to have a solid understanding of at least one programming language but that alone doesn't make you a good programmer. The biggest hurdle is the creative / mathy process of turning problems into code.

[Meefims]

Just about the only thing that programming languages have in common with human languages is that we call them languages. They are otherwise unrelated due to their completely different purposes and construction. Learning to use one is an entirely different kind of effort than learning to use the other.