41–50 of 232 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Or a blueprint, or sheet music, or telegraph transcription, or stenography, or anything where language is a non-prosaic abstraction.
Or perhaps legalese?
It's only briefly mentioned, but learning to read music is quite similar in terms of brain function to learning programming. It's symbolic, logical and structured. My university went so far as to allow students with a bachelor's degree in music to directly enter the computer science master's program.
I have worked in both computer science and classical music, and found many crossover talents. Two previous Director of Music at my school (UBC in Canada) in the last few decades are both musicians and engineers/physicists.
It's only briefly mentioned, but learning to read music is quite similar in terms of brain function to learning programming. It's symbolic, logical and structured. My university went so far as to allow students with a bachelor's degree in music to directly enter the computer science master's program.
This would explain why I can listen to music or TV while coding, but not while reading a book.
[0] https://cacm.acm.org/careers/243179-forget-math-language-ski...
I wonder if editing a piece of written work would activate some of those same problem solving areas as reading computer code does. It that case you're more concerned about structure, grammar, correct wording and such. I find personally i'm in a different frame of mind that reminds me, at least, more of a coding frame of mind than a reading frame of mind. A lot of the time editing, I'm not really paying attention to t…
That sounds reasonable, I've helped edit a few things and need to decide on each pass whether I'm reading for content or structure. Totally different mindset. I've also found when I'm deep in a problem solving mode like coding I tend to be far less empathetic. So it seems to mess with my people skills too until I come up for air.
https://science.sciencemag.org/content/342/6156/377.abstract
It's only briefly mentioned, but learning to read music is quite similar in terms of brain function to learning programming. It's symbolic, logical and structured. My university went so far as to allow students with a bachelor's degree in music to directly enter the computer science master's program.
The one thing I think is different about reading music is sight-reading, where you're reading it at speed while playing it. I can do that with music and text, but not computer code, even in a language that I'm super familiar with.
Of course it doesn't! But I'm interested to know if that's also the case when reading cooking recipes or instruction manuals?
It's interesting to think about, and makes me suspect that this is why I tend to prefer writing my own recipes out as tersely as possible, particularly if I know the general procedure. At this point I don't need to be told to preheat an oven or to scrape down the sides of the stand mixer, so I'll just write down things like "Creaming method, 350° in 8x8 cake pan." I might even start writing them in pseudocode now.
My partner takes it a step further with her cranberry sauce recipe; the instructions just say "C'mon."