There are more than 6000 languages in the world, though most distributions about languages are power laws: for example, word occurrence, language family size and language usage. In effect, only less than 100 living languages are used for written, and many of them do not even have a written form: many wrongly claim that languages are endangered, ignoring that their number is a function of population, and with a growing human population, their number will only grow.

The parallels between natural and computer languages are striking, even though their origins and purposes are so different.

In computer science, there are more than 4000 computer languages, and growing (note that there are only one million people who know how to program): the easiness by how parsers and DSLs can be created can only contribute to this growing trend. And the distribution of their use reveal a similar power law: the truth being that only a small subset of languages is being used in production systems, the rest being academic exercises. Note that their ranking is very volatile (TIOBE index) compared to natural languages, with largely isolated and fragmented communities matching the effect that territories have on natural languages.

Although some subtle differences between natural and computer languages may explain their large number in proportion to their smaller supporting population: computer languages may maintain their usefulness beyond the hardware that supported them stops working, a common occurrence within the world of COBOL.

[amazon_link id=“0691136890” target=“_blank” ]How many natural languages do we need?[/amazon_link] Six, if you were to ask Victor Ginsburgh and Shlomo Weber. And that is also a pretty reasonable number for computer languages: after examining their calculation and analysis, I can only conclude that learning a number larger than this is a clear sign of being over-educated (I’m guilty as charged).