This is a great article that touches on psychology, languages, and language https://medium.com/@old_sound/programming-languages-are-not-languages-c6f161a78c44 P.s. those references are 😍

The German philosopher Heidegger believed thinking is speaking to yourself, and that there is no consciousness without language. Computer languages are languages, just ones with very few nouns. If you carefully examine the task of learning a new language, you have a few dozen numeric primitives, perhaps 500 total verbs, of which you only use about 50 regularly. But then you hit the nouns, and there a million of those. Human languages have a name for all sorts of parts of things. A computer is such a simple universe there aren't even 50 nouns. So they seem very different, but really it is just the giant pile of nouns that makes human languages seem so complex. But the complexity level of grammar of computer languages is pretty comparable. His point that various build and make tools often require a different tool or language is not always true. It just happens that language designers are sometimes shortsighted, and also because of OS idiosyncrasies which require customization for packaging. I find some of the build tools to be so hard to use that i don't even bother learning the language.

I spent a while a few years ago intensively thinking about the difference between languages and tools. But I never considered these terms themselves as analogies when applied to programming. Extremely useful article. But calling programming languages 'tools', while useful once I think of it as an analogy, still leaves a lot on the table IMO. A tool as we usually conceive of it typically has only a few degrees of freedom. Think of your hands, or a screwdriver, or MS paint. But the state space of a programming language is much more vast and non-linear. The mental image I find most useful is of a language as a little universe being born, budding off from ours through a tiny wormhole that can only transmit information at 48 baud. Perhaps we need a neologism. I like conlangs and esolangs. Perhaps we need proglangs, parasitic constructs off natural language with many attributes of tools but nonetheless vast state spaces more akin to languages.

In fact in french, there are two words: Langue for natural language and Language which is more general and that comprises also formal languages.

As I programming language designer, I do believe in a weak form of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. There is now enough experimental evidence that I consider it proven. See the work by Lera Boroditsky, for example.