When you learn a natural language, you can speak with a native speaker even if you make a lot of mistakes; he'll still understand you (and maybe try to help you improve).
Computer languages "feedback" (error messages, etc.) is poor. It's interesting: you can find hundreds of blog posts about syntax, garbage collections, string libraries or whatever but nobody seems to care about error/warning messages. It's a thing that hasn't evolved since a long time.
I totally agree. Its a lost art. The horror of the error messages seems to be proportional to the square of the pretty ness of the language.
I find scheme error messages much friendly the common lisp (which some would say bucks the trend a bit, but they are both lisp I guess).
Also, dynamic typing, and type inference can result in massive bum-steer errors. Its boring staticaly typed languages that tend to be more friendly for error messages. eg most java compilers will tell you, to annoying accuracy what you should have said, where you should have put a ; etc... (which makes you think, why doesn't it just do it !). Some dyn langs to better then others, I think python isn't too bad, but I find ruby really noisy and wierd when I stuff up.
Not so. Natural language is easier because I can learn in a minute to say "Hello world" in a language like German. But it takes forever to fluently write bug-free code for million-line projects.
It's a good question to discuss, if we can get past simplistic apples-to-oranges comparisons. On the one hand natural languages have large vocabularies and cultural context that must be assimilated over time. On the other hand pidgin German works where pidgin lisp does not - natural languages allow more error in the medium.
I was taking amichail's comparison - writing small programs in python vs learning a new natural language - and making it even more extreme to highlight its unfairness. Apparently nobody gets sarcasm anymore :)
If a student already knows English, then it's better to learn to write small programs in a high-level language than it is to learn another natural language.
You compared writing small programs in python with taking years to learn a natural language. I pointed out that the two are not equivalent undertakings. It's not a fair comparison.
Natural languages are not 'easier' or 'harder' than programming languages, they're just different kinds of skills. There's lots of evidence for this: some people have aptitude for one, some for the other.
There are at least two very difficult things about natural languages: messy illogical syntax and enormous vocabulary.
For a simple language such as python, you can learn most of the syntax very quickly. Vocabulary (e.g., libraries) takes a bit longer but still requires much less memorization. And you can always create things from scratch.
But you still haven't addressed the main objection here: that you're comparing two different undertakings. You've compared writing a small app in a high level language with learning a natural language. You could have just as easily said it isn't as hard as proving fermat's last theorem, or writing a novel, or composing a symphony. Thsse things also have a few elements in common with writing a short script in a high level language. But these comparisons don't mean a thing.
If a student already knows English, then it's better to learn to write small programs in a high-level language than it is to learn another natural language.
Learning to write small programs in a high-level language such as python is much easier than learning a natural language.
The former you can do in a week or less. The latter requires years.