Language is the most obvious example, but there’s plenty of others. E.g. taking different parts of the body as subsystems communicating with each other, one neurotransmitter/hormone often has very similar effects in many parts of the body.
In software, different processes can communicate with each other by passing messages having some well-defined format. When you’re sending an API request, you usually have a good idea of what shape the response is going to take and if the request fails, it should fail in a predictable way that can be harmlessly handled. This makes making reliable software easier.
Some cases of standardization are spontaneous/bottom-up, whereas others are engineered top-down. Human language is both. Languages with greater number of users seem to evolve simpler, more standardized grammars, e.g. compare Russian to Czech or English to Icelandic (though syncretism and promiscuous borrowing may also have had an impact in the second case). I don’t know if something like that occurs at all in programming languages but one factor that makes it much less likely is the need to maintain backward-compatibility, which is important for programing languages but much weaker for human languages.
Standardized communication protocols
Language is the most obvious example, but there’s plenty of others. E.g. taking different parts of the body as subsystems communicating with each other, one neurotransmitter/hormone often has very similar effects in many parts of the body.
In software, different processes can communicate with each other by passing messages having some well-defined format. When you’re sending an API request, you usually have a good idea of what shape the response is going to take and if the request fails, it should fail in a predictable way that can be harmlessly handled. This makes making reliable software easier.
Some cases of standardization are spontaneous/bottom-up, whereas others are engineered top-down. Human language is both. Languages with greater number of users seem to evolve simpler, more standardized grammars, e.g. compare Russian to Czech or English to Icelandic (though syncretism and promiscuous borrowing may also have had an impact in the second case). I don’t know if something like that occurs at all in programming languages but one factor that makes it much less likely is the need to maintain backward-compatibility, which is important for programing languages but much weaker for human languages.