oh my god. i’m so excited right now. i majored in Computer Linguistics and Philosophy in college. i have a degree in exactly this. so… a computer programming language (PL) is a dialectic set of commands that can be composed and then compiled into machine langauge (ML) and interpretted by the computer into manipulations on a data structure. the primary goal of a PL is to facilitate human to human communication about what the program’s ML will do. there has only ever been one serious attempt to create a PL with the breadth of expresson of human language (HL) through Perl. this has generally been found to be a bad idea.
however, Perl revealed still addressed some very serious issues in computer linguistics that are starting to be addressed now 30 years later. the biggest success story to come out of Perl is Ruby. see the problem in computer liguistics is that almost all of the PLs in any kind of use are structured around Germanic, Italic, and Ruthenic grammars. this is especially damaging for people whose people have been opressed by speakers of these languages. there’s been a burgeoning movement to structure at least SOME PLs around native languages in Siberia, Africa, southeast Asia, and North America, especially languages that are at risk of total elimination like Lakota, Lomavren, and Ongota. unfortunately we also have to confront the colonial economic forces that have been strangling these languages as no boss wants code written for business in a PL structured around a critically endangered language
TLDR: you’re absolutely right to summarize things how you have, but the proplems at play are WAY more interesting imo
hooray! learning about the abolition of poverty through the framework of making computers go beep boop wasn’t a total waste of time!