Universal Grammar for Computers

The controversial (for reasons that have nothing to do with computational linguistics) linguistics professor Noam Chomsky is famous for his theory of universal grammar. It describes a belief that all of us are born with instinctive understanding of basic parts of speech and their fundamental relationships, although all the different languages of the world have many different ways of expressing those relationships. For example, all human languages have nouns to name things, places, and people, verbs to describe actions and states of being, and adjectives to describe attributes of nouns and verbs. However, languages have many ways to describe, say, the subject (doer) and object of a sentence, to say nothing about how word order varies between languages (such as how Spanish puts object pronouns before a verb instead of after it, "lo visto" means "(I) saw it") or how other meaning can be expressed (returning to Spanish vs English, Spanish has more verb endings than English and thus the subject of a sentence doesn't need to be stated, "Yo lo visto" vs "El lo vista", "I saw it" vs "He saw it").

But what does this have to do with computers? Well, just like human languages, computer languages also have universal building blocks and different ways of expressing relationships between them. For example, while all languages have datatypes (take Anyone can Code for free to learn about those), some languages (such as Python) don't require you to explicitly tell your computer what type of data something is (because Python can figure out if something is an integer, floating point/decimal, or something else). On the other hand, there are languages like C (and its descendants) where you must explicitly tell your computer that a variable (a place where your data goes before it is processed) is an integer, floating point, etc or your computer won't know what to do. Also, different languages have different ways to declare a function (a reusable snippet of code that makes it easier and cleaner to repeat stuff).

While a lot of the example coursework on this site is in Python, there are other languages used in different areas. It is important to think about the underlying structure of all computer languages even if they have differences in how they are written. As long as you don't get confused between them, it should be smooth sailing for you.