Proglangers and conlangers

Yesterday I used the obscure word "proglanger", meaning someone who designs programming languages. It's so rare that for the moment Google knows no other occurrences, but its meaning is probably obvious. Like "natlang", it comes from the slang of conlangers: people who construct languages for fun, like Tolkien. (People who make up whole languages don't hesitate to make up words.) Inventing human languages is obviously related to inventing programming languages (and there is some overlap between the two communities), so I want to think there are lessons to be learned from it, but... I can't think of any. Even from linguistics it's disappointingly hard to learn anything that applies to proglangs.

Okay, one habit from conlanging helps me in proglanging: When I encounter a strange new language (natural or not), I see it as a source of fun ideas, not a mysterious foreign gibberish. This gives me a rather exploitative attitude to new languages, but it probably makes me learn languages faster. But this doesn't impress the part of me that wants to see one of my hobbies inform another.

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