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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

#141

Post by goto11 »

pgt wrote: post #96
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.

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

This have been tried. Languages like Perl and AppleScript was deliberately designed to feel more like natural languages. It turns out this lead to a worse programming language.

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

#142

Post by corford »

dmingod666 wrote: post #68

I think it's closer to legal work, like drafting an agreement or a contract. You have to define the behavior of all the actors the ways they will interact with each other etc.

Totally agree with this. A weird hobby of mine is reading through dense legal contracts, government acts and things like double tax treaties. I enjoy it like I enjoy programming. The mental process I use for understanding these docs and thinking about how I would modify them maps very closely to the "board game" analogy made higher up in this thread.

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

#143

Post by whynaut »

laughinghan wrote: post #126
csense wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have the exact opposite experience. For me, part of the problem is that in math, you have options. If you forget the quadratic formula, you can: - Re-derive it by completing the square on the general quadratic - Solve a specific quadratic you're interested in by factoring or graphing - Try to find zeros with numerical methods The point is, everything's connected to everything else, so it doesn't matter if you forge…

That is such an interesting and...low-level way to think of it. To me it feels a little deeper than just there being a "maze of rules". Your earlier mention of "everything's connected to everything else" resonated with me more. In a sense, the expressive power of programming languages, and mathematical notation, feels very small . I liked the board game metaphor brought up in the top comment: programming languages an…

> Whereas the idea of systematically translating an arbitrary natural sentence into a diagram just seems...nonsensical to me. I wouldn't even know where to begin.

we actually literally did this in high school. It was very informative for me.

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

#144

Post by aksss »

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.

> board game

Legos with the all the rules of AD&D 2nd Ed.

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

#145

Post by magusdei »

nutanc wrote: post #124

So this may mean that language models like GPT-3 are not best suited for code generation tasks. And networks trained on languages may not learn the feature embeddings needed for programming languages.

Wouldn't the empirical success of GPT-3 in simple programming tasks itself be evidence against this interpretation?

Furthermore, GPT-3 is only a language model because it is trained on textual data. Transformer architectures simply map sequences to other sequences. It doesn't particularly matter what those sequences represent. GPT-2 has been used to complete images, for example: https://openai.com/blog/image-gpt/

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

#146

Post by DonaldFisk »

pgt wrote: post #96
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.

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

Like COBOL?

Basing a computer language on a subset of English was done for several query languages, ranging from SQL to Attempto Controlled English (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attempto_Controlled_English).

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

#147

Post by Ma8ee »

pgt wrote: post #96
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.

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

They tried that with COBOL and to a certain degree SQL. We would probably do a better job today, but the idea isn’t new.

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

#148

Post by amelius »

kzrdude wrote: post #134
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.

I think code would be ambiguous. For example in "I'm working on the code" do you mean what we now call the actual code, or the language?

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

#149

Post by dclowd9901 »

vncecartersknee wrote: post #64
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.

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…

I’ve found that reapproaching language when things don’t make sense to be very valuable.

Gender in German, for instance. It seems to be completely arbitrary save for one detail: whichever “sounds” best. I compare this to using “a/an” in English (albeit the rules in English are somewhat more “strict” in this regard.)

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

#150

Post by eru »

lordnacho wrote: post #116
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…

Weirdly I make the same observation as you about second languages and detail in grammar, but I came to the opposite conclusion. I thought natural language and computer language were pretty similar. One issue in the study is what a reasonable comparison is. Our ancestors would have talked about "there is a lion over there" and such mundane things all the time, so we shouldn't be surprised if we're just "nexting" those…

Shakespear wrote in reasonably normal English. It's just that the language has evolved since.
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