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Comment by jMyles | Hacker News Reader

I guess this is pretty off-topic, but I kinda always thought it was unreasonable to regard a "high-level language" as also a "programming" language. If the idea is that it's made for humans-first-computers-second, then it's not really a "programming" language so much as a language that computers happen to be able to understand.

I mean, by this definition, since computers are getting good are parsing English, isn't English a "programming" language?

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The entire purpose of a programming language is that everything written in it describes an unambigiously executable process.

English isn't and never will be a programming language, no matter how much computers will be able to comprehend.

That's only one possible interpretation of computing. The field of semiotics applied to programming has interesting uses where a program needs not be unambiguous to be useful.

It's true that the underlying hardware platform will necessarily work as a deterministic sequence of steps executing a small set of primitives - but building that sequence by hand in an unambiguous language is not necessarily the only way to control the hardware; learning methods and evolutive processes, vaguely directed from high-level goals stated in an ambiguous model, is a possible alternative to the current industrial paradigm and might become common in the future.

Computers are perfect at understanding high level programming languages, but you cannot program in English. All programming languages, including machine code are designed for humans first and computers second, within the limits of what we know how to construct. So, no.

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