[adelmotsjr]

Does it have something to do with the ambiguity of our language (english, spanish, _et cetera_) in contrast with formal languages? Like, it would require more mental effort to describe something in the English language, compared to describe an algorithm using language constructs: you know the constructs, and you know your restrictions in the programming language; in the English language, you don't know in advance what can you say and what you cannot, and you have to imagine what is your message going to get across in reader's minds. Well, who knows?

Anyway, absolutely love your books, have the Crafting Interpreters print copy (which has been inadvertently unboxed by my friend; did want it to be still in the plastic) despite using only the website version, and looking forward to buy the Game Programming Patterns. I hope you continue to be successful in your endeavours (especially if they result in legendary books like these :D). Also, could we be looking forward to a version of yours of a CPU architecture book, a la Nand2Tetris ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)?

[WorldMaker]

Our language centers evolved to build our "natural" languages and our "natural" languages evolved to take the best (most?) use of our language centers. Whether or not it is ambiguity or simplified context or some other "complexity mechanism", if you agree with the Chomsky hierarchy that our "formal" languages are pure subsets of our "natural" languages, then that alone would imply we use only a smaller subset of our language centers when working in "formal" languages.

Though yeah, that does feel awfully reductive as an argument, and leans on a lot of assumptions in Chomsky's theories. I know that there are axes where "formal" languages feel more orthogonal to "natural" languages than "pure subsets". Some parts of "formal" languages to me feel a lot more visual like poetry than linguistic in the same way as prose.