Continuing the discussion from Welcome! Please introduce yourself:
Lou an old bugger of a lifelong learner from Mackay and up for anything.
Mehboob from Mumbai, letās do this.
Hello! My name is Lorena de- Matteis. I am a linguist from Argentina, so I know a lot (?) about languages, but not so much about programming languages. I enrolled at my university at a āProgramming languagesā course, but of course it is for computer sciences students who already know about programming and many programming languages. I am interested in Python because I want to use corpus linguistic tools and a lot of these tools use Python, so, there: I need to at least understand the basics of programming languages and of Python in order to be able to ātalk pythoneseā to the people who will help me by developing the tools I need as a linguist. Besides, I like the challenge to learn to think differently about things and problems and solutions. I am happy this platform is available to do so online, saving time and interacting with other people in my ānon-programmerā shoes. Looking forward to having a great learning experience! Regards 
Lore
Hi!
Iāve been looking at the MIT Courseware offering for the past few years and just havenāt jumped, this sounded a little more ārelaxedā and Iām ready to ājumpā.
Hi, I am Simon from Cape Town. There are several of us all taking this course on at the same time.
Looking forward to learning some python.
Hi, everyone! Iām EDunlap in Chicago. My library system has a group to study Python, so I figured why not? A motto I have is āTry something new sometime!ā so here I am!
Canāt wait to learn this new skill and to immerse myself in it via a online/offline community as much as I can. Thanks! 
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I am the Tutorial Doctor. I have messed around with Python before. Just want to meet some folks and learn some more.
Hey @Loreleidem I really wonder if you will be able to find any resemblance between the computer languages and the natural languages.
Please share your impressions?
Erika
Hi Erika,
Of course there are resemblances, but also big BIG differences.
Resemblances: the most obvious ones, the existence of a set of synctactic rules, a semantic and also, though I still donāt really grasp the concept for computer languages a pragmatic.
Also, certain concepts as variables can be also thought of in terms of natural languages. Usually, we linguist talk about variables in the fields of phonology and phonetics (not everyone pronounces the āsoundsā in a language the same way, there is even a social structure to explain and predict certain sounds in certain contexts, etc.), but I was just thinking the other day about the scope of code (in the computer sense of the word) in which a certain variable holds a certain value, for example, and relating [this] to phenomena like anaphora in spoken/written texts. For example, in (this) brief text, the this I put within brackets refers,in the present paragraph, to āthe fact that a variable has a certain valueā, so, the reference of that pronoun is anaphoric, you have to look for it in the preceding text. But the pronoun within parenthesis has a demonstrative value, its meaning not being anaphoric because it depends on the noun after. I know it is not a perfect analogy, but surely we all have read complex texts in which you ask yourself what is the meaning of this expression and you have to search for it in the preceding/or following text. And the expression involved, so, can be thought of as a kind of āvariableā because if it appears in another place perhaps it has a different referent.
Also, I like the āfreeā syntax of Python, I mean, it seems a little more free than in other languages Iāve seen. I t is a wide stretch, but it makes me think of old Latin, because the word order was a lot more ārandomā than it was in late Latin, less fixed.
This is, of course, of no use to the task of programming, but while I work on my āpythoneseā I have to use as many analogies to make sense of things. Yesterday I was talking to another linguist and I told her that I was building a kind of āpidginā to interact with my Programming Languages instructors and the other students, because we use a lot of similar words but with quite a different meaning, yet the subjective values we give to different languages are so similarā¦
For example:
- code: for programmers, it is a piece of programming sentences, but for us it is a whole linguistic system,
- words (reserved words, for example): there are no such words in natural languages, unless you are talking about some jargon or cryptic language,
- pragmatics: as I said, I donāt grasp completely the programming languages sense, but for linguists and pragmaticians, context is key,
- alphabet: for programming languages it is a set of characters, but for us linguists each character ideally ācorresponds toā a phoneme, which is a unit that combines with others to form units with meaning but alphabets do not always correspond precisely to a sound (as English speakers you know this much better than myself, as a Spanish speaker we have fewer problems of correspondence),
As for subjective values, I have heard and read expressions like : āthis language is logicā, āclearā, āintuitiveā, āsuccessfulā, āefficientā, āsuperior/inferiorā, āfunā, āniceā, āchallengingā and my top favorite, āelegantā. As a sociolinguist (I didnāt say this before, but though I know about Chomsky main ideas, I am not a generativist, I would have it a lot easier to learn how to code!), we are trained to avoid this kind of judgement, but it is fun to notice that the subjective evaluation works also in the field of programming languages.
Sorry for the quick answer, I hope I didnāt make many grammar errors and you could understand me.
Best regards,
Lorena
(PS I am a little behind, hopefully I will catch up soon with the lessons. But with codecademy I got to the first part of Functions, so, behind with the reading, more into the practicing. I am reading also the book Natural Language Processing with Python, though, so, not so behind!)
Hi Lorel. I actually took on learning computer programming while creating a curriculum on how to learn spoken languages. I thought of making my own tools too. I typed an entry on āParts of Speech in Programming.ā
Syntax are the grammar rules of programming. There are also semantics involved too.
Cool thin is you can use Python to parse documents and extract the parts of speech from it. There is a tool that can even summarize a body of text (not in python, but possible with python).:
http://www.tools4noobs.com/summarize/
If you want to check it out:
http://forum.maratis3d.com/viewtopic.php?id=868