Understanding Language

This week's post will be short as I'm juggling a few tasks currently. For the past two weeks I've been walking, biking, and driving around the city of Miami with a sound level meter to measure the noise across the city's various neighborhoods. I've also been teaching myself how to create visualizations with the D3 library in javascript. I'll admit that I was a bit worried that I wouldn't have enough time in the semester to properly learn javascript and D3 for my project. I've had numerous friends tell me before that this was the most difficult programming language. But as I went through the exercises and tasks in the Mozilla Developer Network I found my experience with other programming languages, like Python and R, start to kick in.

Linguists would probably have my head if they read this but programming languages are just that: languages. They have specific rules and syntax. When you learn one programming language really well the other languages become much easier to learn. It's easier to notice the similarities and differences between the languages and understand the structure of each. As a native Spanish speaker, this process is similar to learning French. The languages are different, but there is a high degree of lexical similarity and grammatical structure. Like Spanish and French, Python and Javascript have a lot in common that makes it easier to pick up one once you know the other.