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

Post by vanderZwan » Wed, Dec 16, 2020, 4:10 PM UTC

syrrim wrote: post #63

ipnon wrote: post #47

And yet natural language aptitude highly predicts programming ability[0] [0] https://cacm.acm.org/careers/243179-forget-math-language-ski...

>And yet natural language aptitude highly predicts programming ability Its all correlated with g. >[0] They contrast "language learning ability", ie intrinsic intelligence, with "math knowledge", ie amount of schooling. For reference, you can take (a version of) the math knowledge test used here: https://www.idrlabs.com/numeracy/test.php If the article wanted to give a more honest interpretation of the paper, they wo…

Post by oarsinsync » Wed, Dec 16, 2020, 4:34 PM UTC

tremon wrote: post #140

oarsinsync wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Post by mejutoco » Wed, Dec 16, 2020, 5:08 PM UTC

dclowd9901 wrote: post #149

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…

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.)

Post by datameta » Wed, Dec 16, 2020, 5:32 PM UTC

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.

Post by 1970-01-01 » Wed, Dec 16, 2020, 6:17 PM UTC

rvense wrote: post #127

1970-01-01 wrote: post #93

>The subjects in the study were all young adults proficient in the language they were being tested on. They name Python and ScratchJr, but no hints on what spoken languages were examined. I've been told Chinese and Japanese are much closer than Romance languages to code.

That's a very strange statement, since Chinese and Japanese are not at all similar languages. There are some loanwords, the shared writing system and a lot of historical and cultural, err, interchange, but they have no shared linguistic ancestor and grammatically are just about as different as languages can be. Linguistically, Japanese and Chinese have about as much in common as English and Navajo.