Is that accurate? I thought that computer operating systems pre-dated Chomsky by around a hundred years.
Yah, yah, I know... Charles Babbage invented the first computer, and Ada, Lady Lovelace was the first programmer, on Babbage's computer. Amazing the legends the historians can create when they go searching for "historical roots" for the Introduction to Computers course. Babbage's machine was a very complex design that was never built, and Lady Lovelace never got to program it. To say that he invented the computer is like saying that Leonardo da Vinci invented the airplane. They both had paper designs that might have worked, but they remained on paper.
The first real computer was built during the latter part of World War II.
Chomsky's relevant work was somewhere around 1960, plus or minus--about 15 years or so after the first computer.
It has to do with computer languages, rather than operating systems, although both were undergoing a lot of evolution around that time. The earlier computer languages, such as COBOL and FORTRAN, were designed with
ad hoc syntaxes that they managed to make work. The theoretical developments in grammers allowed for the design of more modern languages like C, ALGOL, Ada, Verilog, and many others. Chomsky's work in grammers was very significant to the development of modern scanning and parsing techniques.
I was referring to his theories in relation to to human development.
Yup, I got that. That's why I said, "(Which says nothing about whether his grammers had any relevance in the area that he intended to be studying, which was
human linguistics.)" I don't know anything about his work beyond its application to computer languages. I am tempted to quess that the rigid structures he developed that work so well on inflexible automatons don't work well at all when applied to humans. But, I don't actually know enough about that part of his work to even guess about it.
