Inverse Sapir-Whorf and programming languages

The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, in it simplest form, is the idea that the language you speak influences the thoughts you think. This post is about a twist on this idea, that I’m calling “Inverse Sapir-Whorf” (for want of a better term), and how we see it in computer programming languages. Sapir-Whorf is one of those ideas that has been popularised in general culture in a rather misrepresented and exaggerated form. In the field of linguistics, not many people today take seriously the “strong” forms of Sapir-Whorf, such as “linguistic determinism” – the idea that a language controls your thoughts or limits what you can think, or that you even need certain languages to think certain thoughts. For example, just because a language might lack grammatical tenses, it doesn’t at all follow that the speakers will be more limited in how they think about time – there are always other ways you can express time. There is a fair amount of evidence that spoken languages can affect perception, skill and…