[mjp94]

The comparison made between English and C++ (spoken/written language and programming language) makes me wonder if people should even be comparing the two at at all. They do serve similar purposes in a sense, but what I'm wondering is if we would even compare them if they both weren't called "languages"? If the words used for programming language and written/spoken languages were completely disjoint, would this point even be brought up?

[gsg]

"It's possible to program a computer in English. It's also possible to make an airplane controlled by reins and spurs." - John McCarthy.

[Fargren]

Language Theory is a subset of automata theory that covers both. So at least in some sense, they are comparable. We can place them in Chomsky's Hierarchy and compare the constructs that are meaningful in both.

[agentultra]

They share the same node, language, so I don't see they could avoid comparison. In fact, programming language could be argued to be a specialization of spoken language. After all we're not punching in bytes by hand on control cards anymore.

[hercynium]

Indeed, the blurring of this distinction became the means by which Larry Wall earned his college degree!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Wall#Education

He talks about it in more depth in this interview: http://youtu.be/aNAtbYSxzuA