I’d say it’s more akin to reading the directions for solving a puzzle, like the moves list for a chess game or something, while imagining the board in your head.
To the brain, reading computer code is not the same as reading language
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Re: To the brain, reading computer code is not the same as reading language
#72Take that, COBOL! But seriously, by recalling and introspecting the thought process occurred just before an interruption, I think coding is moke akin to navigating a landscape -- it has a substantial spatial component. Simply put, it's like thinking about consequences and dependencies at every given line/statement. Something that we don't do (or do rarely) while speaking or reading.
Also, take that Larry Wall! I guess?
Re: To the brain, reading computer code is not the same as reading language
#73As someone who is fluently bilingual and speaks a third language and is also proficient or better in a half dozen programming languages along with having written code in many more, this is completely obvious to me. Learning a programming language is much closer to learning a complex board game than it is a natural language.
Whoa, the complex board game analogy is new to me but it rings so true. Like you I’m bilingual. Like you I know many programming languages (dangerous level or above). To equate learning “syntax” of the language as learning a complex board game is such a great analogy.
Re: To the brain, reading computer code is not the same as reading language
#74As someone who is fluently bilingual and speaks a third language and is also proficient or better in a half dozen programming languages along with having written code in many more, this is completely obvious to me. Learning a programming language is much closer to learning a complex board game than it is a natural language.
> this is completely obvious to me This was my reaction as well: what, they needed to do a study to figure this out?
On the one hand, the design of Python implies that they think the natural language parts are important. On the other hand, yes we should confirm things that are our intuition says are completely obvious, otherwise when our intuition fails (as it frequently does, see the point about Python) we end up optimizing the wrong thing.
Re: To the brain, reading computer code is not the same as reading language
#75It'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.
Fascinating! Any chance I could know which school it is? 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.
Northern Illinois University
(though it's been.... a while... since I graduated.)
Re: To the brain, reading computer code is not the same as reading language
#76It'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.
In the early days of computing (that is, when computer companies and universities were finding the first people to learn programming) music experience was a strong signal for programming ability! Playing music prepared them for focusing on the low-level details while holding the big picture in their head. [0]
[0] The Dream Machine by Waldrop
Re: To the brain, reading computer code is not the same as reading language
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree, this is probably because we never 'speak' (although write) in programming languages trying to convey something. This goes same for 'hearing' (although we read and understand, hopefully). We always use human languages for those purposes, well, except for those times we speak in pseudo-code.
this is probably because we never 'speak' (although write) in programming languages trying to convey something Have you told anyone to grep, cat, mount, fsck, or sudo? I'd say the more experience one has with a programming language, the more reading and writing it feels like a natural language.
These are borrowings or coins into a natural language. A word from bash does not mean you are speaking bash any more than saying macaron would mean you are speaking French.
Re: To the brain, reading computer code is not the same as reading language
#78And yet natural language aptitude highly predicts programming ability[0] [0] https://cacm.acm.org/careers/243179-forget-math-language-ski...
I'm not intending to make some grandiose point here, only that I suspect natural language aptitude is highly correlated with success in various different domains, not just programming.
It really is misunderstood by the public what a difficult intellectual task programming computers is.
Re: To the brain, reading computer code is not the same as reading language
#79What about reading Perl? Or Inform?
Re: To the brain, reading computer code is not the same as reading language
#80Having fumed for years about the too-often poor state of software documentation and program comments, I was not surprised by the result, although it was nice to see it proved.
What did surprise me, though, was the lack of similarity to mathematical thinking. Was, this, though, because they used fairly simple snippets of Python, a programming language which is not very mathematical in its notation? Would a different result have been obtained had they asked the subjects to reason about a multithreaded C++ program which copiously used autoincrementing pointers and polymorphism?
And, can personal preferences in programming languages be partly down to which parts of their brains people like to use?
And, as the problems were simple, the study doesn't say anything about expert programmers. Is the often-quoted 10× difference between the best and worst programmers associated with the best ones also involving the mathematical and linguistic parts of their brains?
It's probably not practical to measure programming at a high level (or indeed violin playing at a high level) inside an MRI machine, given the cramped and noisy conditions, so we may not have answers to the interesting questions raised any time soon.