After much procrastination, I am finally posting the results of my research into how the frequent use of computer programming languages affect the brain.

As followers of the blog will remember, after reading theories about how learning languages affect the brain, I wanted to know whether computer programming languages also affected the brain. With a few notable exceptions (e.g. Murnane, 1993) most research about the cognitive effects of computer programming seemed to have focused on programming as a problem solving rather than a linguistic activity. If computer languages were indeed languages, I thought that it would make sense for them to affect the brain in a similar way to other languages.

This is quite a big subject, so I honed in on bilingualism. If computer programming languages are languages, then people who spoke one language and could programme to a high standard should be bilingual. Research has suggested that…