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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

#131

Post by magusdei »

laughinghan wrote: post #122
motakraxxer wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was originally surprised by the study and your comment, since I generally find no difference between natural languages , math and programming languages. (I am a math major). However, most of the people I interact with find my exposition methods curious in sense of structure. So, I shared this study with some of my friends, and they agreed with the study too. When I pointed out my surprise to them, they told me that…

Wow, that's crazy. Others here, and presumably your friends, have talked about how they think of programming "visually", but they don't think visually about conversing in natural language. I thought of a concrete way to describe it: it "feels obvious" to me that any programming language could be "easily" replaced by a systematic diagramming method, with programs translated systematically into equivalent diagrams. If…

Context-free grammars were originally invented by linguists for analyzing natural language. You can see examples of phrase structure and dependency diagrams e.g. here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dependency_grammar

For what it's worth, I agree with OP, and have a very "language-oriented" thinking style. I certainly don't visualize anything while programming or doing math (except for geometry and the like). My thinking feels like it's more based on constraint solving and seeing analogies between domains.

Re: To the brain, reading computer code is not the same as reading language

#134

Post by kzrdude »

amelius wrote: post #133

Perhaps we shouldn't call it programming language then. Suggestions for a better name?

Tough one. Maybe script. That will make everyone groan. It's still a language metaphor (Latin script, Korean script).

Or programming system in analogue of writing system. Becomes progsys for short.

I know - why not just call it code? That's what we already do. We can just make it the preferred term.

Re: To the brain, reading computer code is not the same as reading language

#135

Post by infogulch »

ZephyrBlu wrote: post #98
pgt wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your comment is insightful and suggests that perhaps we should try to design a programming language that feels more like a natural language.

I don't think making a programming language more like natural language would be helpful. It's much harder to learn a natural language than a programming language.

And also harder for a computer to interpret and execute a natural language.

Re: To the brain, reading computer code is not the same as reading language

#136

Post by kichimi »

traceroute66 wrote: post #128
vncecartersknee wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel exactly the same, I've been learning a second language and it's nothing like learning programming, in fact arguably the opposite, I've found that obsessing over grammar is almost detrimental to making progress with a new language. The confident students who aren't concerned with getting all the specifics of grammar exactly perfect are the ones that are making the most progress toward being conversational, they…

> obsessing over grammar is almost detrimental to making progress with a new language If you skip over the hard parts, then you're not exactly learning a language. You might as well just learn from one of those "Hello, my name is Bob, where's the toilet ? " cartoon books. Its a bit like those people who learn programming informally. Most of them end up writing spaghetti code for the rest of their lives. Its the same…

If you master grammar but can't pronounce anything, or your vocabulary is too small, or you have no confidence to speak, or you don't learn the way natives say things through trial and error, then all your efforts are completely wasted.

Language isn't just some word for word translations and a new sentence structure, it's much much deeper than that.

The only thing that is required to learn a language is tens of thousands of hours of practice.

Re: To the brain, reading computer code is not the same as reading language

#137

Post by magusdei »

DoreenMichele wrote: post #56
danishdev wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am autistic.. I read code and "interpolate" across lines quite well. On the other hand, finishing one basic written sentence can sometimes be a surprising struggle.

Human language tends to be pretty fuzzy. Code seems to be quite precise and very pedantic about details. In human language, you can play with idioms, metaphors, double entendre, etc. In writing code, you miss one symbol and it breaks.

You can play in a similar way with code. It's just that other developers will hate you for it.

Re: To the brain, reading computer code is not the same as reading language

#138

Post by coldtea »

traceroute66 wrote: post #128
vncecartersknee wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel exactly the same, I've been learning a second language and it's nothing like learning programming, in fact arguably the opposite, I've found that obsessing over grammar is almost detrimental to making progress with a new language. The confident students who aren't concerned with getting all the specifics of grammar exactly perfect are the ones that are making the most progress toward being conversational, they…

> obsessing over grammar is almost detrimental to making progress with a new language If you skip over the hard parts, then you're not exactly learning a language. You might as well just learn from one of those "Hello, my name is Bob, where's the toilet ? " cartoon books. Its a bit like those people who learn programming informally. Most of them end up writing spaghetti code for the rest of their lives. Its the same…

>If you skip over the hard parts, then you're not exactly learning a language.

That's not true. Most native speaks have little knowledge of the grammar and syntax beyond intuitive. They have forgotten most of what they've been taught at school, plus, they could speak quite well before going to school and being taught grammar in the first place. We acquire language by osmosis, not by studying, and even less so by studying the syntax.

Re: To the brain, reading computer code is not the same as reading language

#139

Post by jonplackett »

User23 wrote: post #28

As 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.

As someone who is a lot less proficient in coding languages and speaks a bit of Spanish. It’s still really obvious. Not sure why anyone would think of them as equivalents aside from both being named a ‘language’

Re: To the brain, reading computer code is not the same as reading language

#140

Post by tremon »

oarsinsync wrote: post #108
godelski wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand this. If your code has wrong syntax it doesn't compile. If wrong grammar you can get very wrong results. But in english you can say "I go store" and it's understandable (which btw, can be a direct translation from several languages)

> If your code has wrong syntax it doesn't compile. If wrong grammar you can get very wrong results. In both cases, when you get it that wrong that your meaning doesn’t come across correctly, it’ll usually get pointed out to you, either by the compiler or the person you’re talking to, so you can go back and try again. Eventually, you’ve potentially gotten it right when the compiler stops throwing errors or the person…

In my experience, when you're an adult, people are too polite/reserved/caring/uncaring to correct spoken language errors for you. They'll be much more likely to infer what you meant silently, and react as if you'd spoken the sentence perfectly. In that sense, people are much more like a web browser in how they process your language than a compiler.
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