Comment by dingnuts
2 days ago
No, the comparison to natural languages is what is whack. If you understand the underlying concepts that programming languages pick and choose from as features, all you have to learn is what keywords map to those concepts and the language's syntax.
The comparison to natural languages would be if you could learn one language and then quickly pick up every other language of that "class" after learning how that single language works. That's not really how natural language works at all, but it does work with programming languages.
> If you understand the underlying concepts that programming languages pick and choose from as features, all you have to learn is what keywords map to those concepts and the language's syntax.
If you understand the grammatical topics that a natural language picks, all you have to learn is what word transformation rules map to those concepts, and the natural language's vocabulary.
> The comparison to natural languages would be if you could learn one language and then quickly pick up every other language of that "class" after learning how that single language works.
There do exist books on this topic (though more commonly for language families). See for example
https://www.quadrilingual.com/
or the book
EuRom 5. Leggere e capire 5 lingue romanze
> That's not really how natural language works at all, but it does work with programming languages.
... it might give you some shallow knowledge in a very limited subset of programming languages.
> If you understand the grammatical topics that a natural language picks, all you have to learn is what word transformation rules map to those concepts, and the natural language's vocabulary.
Yes, and then do that in real time while you're having a conversation with someone who's been learning the language since they were a baby. It is an unreasonable comparison.