To the brain, reading computer code is not the same as reading language (2020)

Better replace the submission with the linked article at the end: https://news.mit.edu/2020/brain-reading-computer-code-1215

The paper wasn't linked as far as I can tell but is probably https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7738192/pdf/eli...

> While the programmers lay in a functional magnetic resonance (fMRI) scanner, the researchers showed them snippets of code and asked them to predict what action the code would produce

I have a suspicion that writing code and understanding that written by someone else are different skill sets.

I disagree.

Wikipedia's definition [1] is what I had in mind for language:

> Language is a structured system of communication that consists of grammar and vocabulary

Programming languages are structured, have grammars (often described formally using a grammar definition for some parser generator) and vocabulary (the set of functions and types you can use, possibly modules and package, basically), and they are used to communicate (with the machines, and with fellow developers).

The "file format specification" would be a (subset of) the specification of the language, not the language itself, and yes, a file format specification can describe a language (but I believe we only say this for stuff intended to be read and written by a human - so ZIP would not be a language, but HTML would be).

I do agree that programming languages and human languages are not the same thing, they have different characteristics, traits, use cases, behavior… and that's why this study compares them. And that's also why we need to make the distinction. And they also have common stuff, hence the same word. But even if you disagree that they have a relevant amount of common stuff, polysemy is a thing, so it's still "fine" to call English a language and C a language. Quotes around fine because I'm actually only describing what happens: we do call them both "language", that's a fact.

> I'd argue that biggest part of programming is

It might be, but the paper studies and focuses on programming languages, not the more general practice of programming (which is worth studying, but studies always have a (restricted) scope).

> remember the literate programming movement

Where's the confusion in / what's wrong this? Some think that it's better to narrate in code and we call that literate programming. I don't share the vision, but everything looks clear to me.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language

From the linked article, they found that it activates the region of the brain that carefully reasons through unfamiliar problems. They also speculate that this might not generalize to people with 30 years of programming experience. Well, fine, a lot of academic research is done with students. But doesn’t that invalidate any comparisons with natural language processing, something that the test subjects do have decades of experience in?

I feel like this is akin to asking someone to read a fairytale and to tell you how many times a person crossed a bridge in it, or what they carry in their hand in the end, or where the apple is when all is done.

I don’t think this is about understand what is written, it’s about figuring out what that which is written means.