A few years ago I visited a friend who is a graduate student in linguistics. After some time he asked me if I was aware of the work by Chomsky on formal languages. I told him that yes, Chomsky work was a basis for much of the developments in theoretical computer science. More than that, I was glad to learn that there was something technical that I could share and discuss with other people in linguistics.At the time I found this was just a great coincidence. It was only recently, though, that I started to think seriously about the implications of the idea that much of our understanding of compu...