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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

#211

Post by rvense »

1970-01-01 wrote: post #209
rvense wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They are similar because they are both logographic languages. The MIT team should of added logographic languages in their experiment for the same reasons in this blog post: https://blog.fluent-forever.com/logograms/

Chinese script is logographic, Japanese only partially so.

But a language is not its script.

By approximation all modern languages that have been written have been written in the Latin script. That doesn't make them "similar languages" in any real sense. And conversely, many languages use several different scripts for the same language in different regions/groups depending on politics.

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

#212

Post by knolax »

tgv wrote: post #160
nutanc wrote: post #154

This may be the reason why you can still learn programming even when you are 40 years old, but its very hard for you to learn a new language the older you get as you language acquisition skills fade away. Also the experiment was "The researchers showed them snippets of code and asked them to predict what action the code would produce.". This may not be the best way to prove the thesis conclusively. Because when I rea…

First: that language acquisition at a later age is so much harder is not true. It takes a child 6 to 10 years to get fluent in their first language, and they don't spend 3 hours per week studying it, but 80. For adults, there are language schools with an immersive program. They are expensive, but successful. You probably won't get as good as when you'd have been immersed from day 1 in your life, but you can get quite…

Have you never met any immigrants before? There's a very stark cutoff age before which learning a language results in no accent and after which the accent is almost impossible to eliminate.

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

#213

Post by godelski »

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…

I disagree with this. How many people do you know that have been speaking English for years but still miss articles ('a', 'the')? It is still very easy to understand these people. We could say the same about tones, diction, and accents. Plenty of people that don't sound native can easily be understood. You'd actually be surprised how much you can butcher a language and still be able to communicate (this is really helpful to language learners!). There's so much fuzziness here that it I haven't seen any compiler (plugin, shell, etc) anywhere near this level of fuzziness.

Tldr: Compilers you need to be fairly precise, natural languages you barely need to be in the ball park.

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

#214

Post by godelski »

jjk166 wrote: post #191
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)

The people you're talking to are just incredibly intelligent compilers. We could make a compiler that takes something that resembles a for loop and changes it to be correct, but to do so would strip a programmer of the power to make something similar to but not quite a for loop, which would generally be undesirable in a programming language. "I go store" is reasonably close to correct: you have a subject, predicate,…

The difference is in natural languages you can make tons of errors and be extremely fuzzy and it won't harm the interpretation. Compilers make you update, language doesn't (this does actually cause people to speak a language for decades and never sound native). Often times we can use grammar of another language and the words from another and still get concepts aligned (useful for language learners who will tend to use the grammar of their native language). "Pineapple store I go get" can be a perfectly understandable sentence when context is involved. You can also use direct translations of words from other languages "I put on my... uh... finger shoes." (contextual clues always help, especially in writing).

Humans are "fuzzy compiling" to such a degree (and giving no errors or warnings to the writer) that it is hard to compare the two.

> If we consider "human languages" like legalese or diplomatic language, where the goal as with programming languages is to limit ambiguity as much as possible while maintaining the speaker's ability to potentially say as many things as possible, syntax becomes very important, and typically it's preferred that the interpreter raise an error rather than try to guess at the speaker's intentions.

Such a concept is not even possible in natural languages. Natural languages are so full of ambiguity that even native speakers from similar regions often confuse one another. Because frankly many don't realize there's: what you intend to say, what you say, and what is heard (times number of listeners). When listening to a non-native speaker we focus a lot of trying to understand intent from them. When listening to native speakers we focus a lot on what is said and what we hear (often ignoring intent). There is just so much fuzziness to natural language that it is a bit ludicrous to compare them. The fuzziness of natural language and strictness of programming languages are necessary features too.

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

#215

Post by beowulfey »

Kaveren wrote: post #193
beowulfey wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It isn't only guesswork -- there is a lot of reading and researching involved too. I figured that was obvious but perhaps it was not. The point is that it is learning by doing rather than rote memorization and recall. It is easier for me to do something, see the result, and figure out what went wrong if it didn't work. It allows me to understand the function behind something, versus just being told "this is how to do…

The better alternative is just to learn thoroughly and apply knowledge as much as you can. You can explore without guesswork.

I honestly think we’re talking about doing the same thing.

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

#216

Post by bzbarsky »

godelski wrote: post #213
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…

I disagree with this. How many people do you know that have been speaking English for years but still miss articles ('a', 'the')? It is still very easy to understand these people. We could say the same about tones, diction, and accents. Plenty of people that don't sound native can easily be understood. You'd actually be surprised how much you can butcher a language and still be able to communicate (this is really hel…

The important part for the fuzzy understanding is shared context. This is what lets humans who have no languages in common communicate basic things in ad-hoc sign language bits as well.

And if the context fails, things can go just as badly as with computers, in the short run. In the longer run, people notice that something went wrong and are likely to go back to an earlier point and try to clarify, whereas computer systems are not great at it.

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

#217

Post by bzbarsky »

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…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentence_diagram#Reed%E2%80%93... is totally a thing I recall with moderate fondness from high school.

Yes, if you try to apply it to some parts of "Moby Dick" it will be rather painful. :)

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

#218

Post by ahartmetz »

kitd wrote: post #114
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 would say, however, that designing software uses similar mental processes to translating text from one language to another. You take ideas in one form and express them in terms idiomatic to the other.

But for two completely different audiences: One extremely precise and extremely stupid, the other is a computer. Just kidding! The other is a creature like you and me.

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

#219

Post by syrrim »

vanderZwan wrote: post #201
syrrim wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

What is "g" in this context? My first association is the gravitational constant, but somehow I highly doubt you're referring to that

General intelligence.

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

#220

Post by 8bitsrule »

There was a time when 'a set of computer instructions' was called a 'routine'. Computer 'languages' are extremely restricted, and are primarily logical.

Unlike human languages: English (and probably most others) has hundreds of words that can be used to nuance, imply, suggest, refine, gradate, distinguish, obscure, conceal, intimate, impute.

If we don't know what they mean we can often skip right past them. (Computers don't do 'gist'.) Illogic is not only permitted, it's often essential.

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