Extinction Of Human Languages Affects Programming?

Tanmay Kudyadi writes "An article from NewScientist.com reports that half of all human languages will have disappeared by the end of the century, as smaller societies are assimilated into national and global cultures. This may be great news if one is looking at a common standard for communication, but it dosen't help those designing the next generation of programming languages. For example, there's an extremely strong link between Panini's Grammar and computer science (PDF link), and with every language lost, there is a possibility that we may have missed an opportunity at improving the underlying heuristics."

Comments

Re:Language and Computer Science

[EvilTwinSkippy]

Um, I look at C and assembler are more about moving data into and out of registers than anything else. The "rules" have more to do with 4th century algebra then 20th century linguistics. Granted, 19th century Boolean logic does contribute a bit.

Re:English is the world language (maybe)

[the_2nd_coming]

well, that did not make it a world language....

the only reason it became the international language of deplomacy was because the end of WW I and the legue of nations occured there. the Olympics uses it because a French man was the one who founded the modern Olympic games.

the french language was not a transitional language at any point in its history, which is what makes a world language.