Stands to reason. The brain has to constantly resolve ambiguity when reading natural languages, while artificial languages are (usually) designed to be free of ambiguity.
To the brain, reading computer code is not the same as reading language (2020)
51–60 of 212 posts
Re: To the brain, reading computer code is not the same as reading language (2020)
#52Duh, not even reading math is the same as language.
That, I feel, is the greatest barrier for math teaching in our education system.
The need to compress everything into a line or two, supposedly for ease of transcription and speed.
Hopefully VR and AR can bring about a novel way to teach math which is much more visual/extensive and less about signs and the need to compress
Re: To the brain, reading computer code is not the same as reading language (2020)
#53I'm more surprised that anyone with any experience in programming languages has actually thought this could be the case. Making programming languages superficially more like human languages is one of the classic rookie mistakes of programming language design. (See Perl's "do what I mean" paradigm and the chaos that resulted from it)
I think two important differences right there are that programming languages are more like "constructing" some sort of entity - a formula, an algorithm, a data structure, an architecture of different components, etc" than it is about communication. Consequently, a lot of "thought" when programming is about the implicit properties of that thing being constructed and less so about the syntactic specifics.
You can do the same in human language, e.g. if you write a recipe, a legal text, a mathematical definition, rules for a board game or instructions for an LLM, but human language can also be used for many modes of communication that have completely different purposes.
I think a comparison of brain activity between reading computer code and reading formalized human language - or between reading formalized and non-formalized human language would be more interesting.
Re: To the brain, reading computer code is not the same as reading language (2020)
#54Duh, not even reading math is the same as language. That, I feel, is the greatest barrier for math teaching in our education system. The need to compress everything into a line or two, supposedly for ease of transcription and speed. Hopefully VR and AR can bring about a novel way to teach math which is much more visual/extensive and less about signs and the need to compress
While names reveal intention I do find it easier to reason about code when everything has one letter variables. If I'm trying to think about an algorithm or just some complex logic, the shorter the names, the easier I can manipulate things and reason about them I have found
Re: To the brain, reading computer code is not the same as reading language (2020)
#55To me, reading new code is like separating a bunch of string that's been tangled together. What thread goes where, what's it's purpose, how is it connected to the other threads? It's a very active process.
Reading language is different, I move my eyes left to right, top to bottom, to consume someone else's ideas. It's a much more passive process than reading code.
Re: To the brain, reading computer code is not the same as reading language (2020)
#56Duh, not even reading math is the same as language. That, I feel, is the greatest barrier for math teaching in our education system. The need to compress everything into a line or two, supposedly for ease of transcription and speed. Hopefully VR and AR can bring about a novel way to teach math which is much more visual/extensive and less about signs and the need to compress
While names reveal intention I do find it easier to reason about code when everything has one letter variables. If I'm trying to think about an algorithm or just some complex logic, the shorter the names, the easier I can manipulate things and reason about them I have found
What I am trying to convey is that presently your way is the only way, whereas we deserve something to enable everybody to contribute.
Much like some people get their best intuitions under the shower whereas others do it while walking, other still have them while listening to music...
Re: To the brain, reading computer code is not the same as reading language (2020)
#57I'd be curious to see some research like this done in children with dyslexia. Dyslexia seems to like things that more bilaterally use MD (I'm dyslexic so I often think about brain functioning in that context).
Re: To the brain, reading computer code is not the same as reading language (2020)
#58From 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…
Maybe compare to second year students of a very foreign language...
(Though I have to say, I'm a self-taught programmer with an academic background in theoretical linguistics as well as university-level experience of several languages quite different to my first language, and this result doesn't not surprise me. There are some obviously analogies to be made at some levels, I think the similarity between human languages and computer code is frequently overstated and a remnant from a more primitive linguistics that was quite narrowly focused on grammar.)
Re: To the brain, reading computer code is not the same as reading language (2020)
#59This feels intuitive to me. At least for programming languages I know well "reading" code is more like looking at it from a structural point of view. Like reviewing a diagram or flowchart.
I don't usually read code from front to back like you do with natural language.
Re: To the brain, reading computer code is not the same as reading language (2020)
#60To me, reading code is more like looking at one of those pictures of a set of gears and then being asked whether “gear A turns anticlockwise or clockwise”. At least this is how it feels. It’s more like studying a mechanism than understanding language.