Computer languages are synthetic, like the human languages of Esperanto and Loglan.
The distinction is how they're formed and developed. Someone didn't sit down 1500 or so years ago and say, "I'm going to make English." It just grew. Specifically Old English grew from a combination of languages used by Germanic tribes (Angles, Saxons, and Jutes in particular). It also borrowed a fair amount of Latin, Old Norse, and perhaps some Celtic. Followed by the development of Middle English with the Norman conquest which brought in French and Latin influence. And then later developed into what we call English today via more borrowing or coinage of words and, later, standardizing spellings and some pronunciatoins.
It's perhaps a little fuzzy if your language has an academy that tries to preserve its essence and creates official dictionaries and bars certain types of word creation. But for most "natural" languages, what makes them natural is the organic growth and evolution that occurs over time. Compared to the artificial selection of elements that happens with synthetic languages.
Call me crazy, but the synthetic vs. natural distinction is still blurry to me. All language is the natural evolution of thought.
> But for most "natural" languages, what makes them natural is the organic growth and evolution that occurs over time.
On this, we agree. This is the exact phenomena that I observe of computer languages.
As a small example, take the "if" statement as used in JavaScript. It wasn't invented by that language, it was borrowed from other languages like Java. But the word "if" came from English. Of course, English speakers didn't invent the concept either. As you describe, English evolved from other languages.
Computer languages are more modern, so we know more of their history. We know who drafted the first iteration of JavaScript, and we've closely tracked its evolution since then. We don't know who came up with the concept of "if", but I doubt that it was given to us humans by some divine god of language.. I think one of our ancestors invented it.
The distinction is how they're formed and developed. Someone didn't sit down 1500 or so years ago and say, "I'm going to make English." It just grew. Specifically Old English grew from a combination of languages used by Germanic tribes (Angles, Saxons, and Jutes in particular). It also borrowed a fair amount of Latin, Old Norse, and perhaps some Celtic. Followed by the development of Middle English with the Norman conquest which brought in French and Latin influence. And then later developed into what we call English today via more borrowing or coinage of words and, later, standardizing spellings and some pronunciatoins.
It's perhaps a little fuzzy if your language has an academy that tries to preserve its essence and creates official dictionaries and bars certain types of word creation. But for most "natural" languages, what makes them natural is the organic growth and evolution that occurs over time. Compared to the artificial selection of elements that happens with synthetic languages.