Lambda the Ultimate

Just finished reading In the Land of Invented Languages, by Arika Okrent. It makes an accessible read for many topics in language.

Natural languages may be less universal than music and less precise than programming languages, but they are far more versatile, and useful in our everyday lives, than either. Ambiguity, or fuzziness of meaning, is not a flaw of natural language but a feature that gives it flexibility and that, for whatever reason, suits our minds and the way we think. Likewise, the fact that languages depend on arbitrary convention or cultural habit is not a flaw but a feature that allows us to rein in the fuzziness by establishing agreed-upon meanings at different levels of precision. Language needs its "flaws" in order to do the enormous range of things we use it for.

Aside from this passage, the book barely mentions PL's at all. But programming languages are, by definition, invented languages (and, no, Perl does not qualify as natural), I think there are many parallels to be drawn. Most language inventors don't do it for the money - creating PL's is not a way to untold wealth. And there are a thousand invented (and programming) languages, so the chance of success is rather slim (and mostly accidental). The book itself is more an informal narrative that goes between personal experience, to examining the persons behind the languages, and on to a more critical analysis of the languages spotlighted. Although there are over 500 listed languages in the appendix, there is only in depth coverage of a dozen or so. The major periods covered:

• Enlightenment: John Wilkins and his Philosophical Language are the main subject of this period. The 17th century saw the widespread adoption of mathematical conventions, and there was a belief that a language could be designed that removed ambiguity - words would convey meaning exactly as intended. That belief is still a central tenet in much PL design.
• Idealism: Here we have Zamenhoff and Esperanto trying to bring about peace, love and understanding by sharing a common language. A couple of WWs would tell us that such utopian visions were not quite achieved. But Esperanto has been the most successful invented language in terms of usage. Most of the languages of this period were designed to be easier to learn, and were a mixture of languages - rather than striking out in bold semantic/syntactic fashion. Of course, we have PLs that want to borrow features from many different sources and strive to be easy to learn. Then again, efforts to reduce the number of languages usually have the effect of just creating more languages.
• Symbols: Charles Bliss and Blissymbolics with emphasis on non-oral language in this section covering symbol language and sign language. Visual PLs is what I thought of here
• Logic: Brown and Loglan were started as a roundabout thought experiment for Sapir-Whorf. But the only answer it would provide would be: what if, instead of trying to get AI from programming languages, we used something like a programming language for speaking, writing and communicating in the large.
• Esoteric: Klingon and other Conlang's are discussed in this section, with the emphasis on language as art or puzzle. Esoteric PLs are similar in spirit.

Lot's of tangential topics that are fun (Chinese writing, Hebrew, Tolkien, etc) and covers some very colorful characters. Not sure if PL designers are quite so eccentric, though I suspect it's only because we are still early in the game for PL evolution.