Is Code Language?

Quotes on Code

"The programmer, like the poet, works only slightly removed from pure thought-stuff. He builds his castles in the air, from air, creating by exertion of the imagination." — Fred Brooks

"A programmer is ideally an essayist who works with traditional aesthetic and literary forms as well as mathematical concepts, to communicate the way that an algorithm works and to convince a reader that the results will be correct." — Donald Knuth

"A human must turn information into intelligence or knowledge. We've tended to forget that no computer will ever ask a new question." — Grace Hopper

Quotes on Language

"Because the process of knowing is inseparable from "languaging," in the new education, language (i.e., all forms of symbolic codification) is regarded as the mediator of all human perception and is used as a unifying and continuing focus of all student inquiry." — Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner

"Language is a process of free creation; its laws and principles are fixed, but the manner in which the principles of generation are used is free and infinitely varied. Even the interpretation and use of words involves a process of free creation." — Noam Chomsky

"Journalists say that when a dog bites a man, that is not news, but when a man bites a dog that is news. This is the essence of the langauge instinct: language conveys news." — Steven Pinker

"Language disguises thought." — Ludwig Wittgenstein