I suddenly became curious:
when the first programming languages were created,
why weren't they based on natural language?
Why did they create separate, difficult syntax to build programming languages instead?
1. Ambiguity vs Precision
- Natural languages are full of metaphors, slang, and context-dependent meanings.
- A computer requires absolute instructions
ex) "bank" => there are several meanings about bank and a computer cannout guess which one is right mean
2. Conciseness
- Programming syntax allows us to express complex logic in a very small amout of space
3. Hardware Constraint
- Early computers had extremely limited memory and processing power
- Parsing the vast and complex rules of human grammar would have been impossible for the vacuum tubes and transistors of the Earlier generation
4. Logical Structure
- Using symbols helps the compiler quickly turn code into the binary that the machine understands