61–70 of 212 posts
I could be convinced that parsing a language at that resolution isn’t how language processing works for general use, but that’s like saying diagraming a sentence isn’t speaking a language. Technically true but missing the point.
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…
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 languag…
It wouldn't even occur to me to think of them as belonging to the same category.
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.
"Language" in the context of PL is a misnomer. People even scientist seem to fall into that trap (remember the literate programming movement). PL's are better described as "Specifications". More similar to file format specifications, later converted to executables or interpreted. > the researchers showed them snippets of code and asked them to predict what action the code would produce. That is only (a small) part of…
I find removing the organizing and communication layers greater increases your velocity. For each idea we need to communicate to others or ourselves (in a linear language) involves a translating process. Removing the need for that layer leaves you in the coding zone. Once you have to leave for translating it becomes an expensive process for your brain to recreate the verbal / non verbal environments (or takes too muc…
It's an absolute nightmare to understand. He may have been in the "coding zone," but he chose variable names that make no sense, abstractions that don't map on to any actual entities, and left no coherent documentation.
I think the organization and communication layers are absolutely critical, and any apparent velocity tradeoff is just accumulating technical debt, because there's probably an entire team who is perpetually on the hook for supporting what you wrote, and actual long-term velocity over time depends on their ability to understand it.
I wonder if the authors (neuroscientists) discussed the premise with programmers and linguists to formulate the hypothesis. I mean, I would say that the question should have been: are the same regions of the brain activated when doing math/chemistry/physics/neuroscience(so meta!)/science and coding, instead of when talking/writing/reading and coding.
Maybe there are people who experience coding differently - please, let me know if so, but I would be so much surprised.
"Language" in the context of PL is a misnomer. People even scientist seem to fall into that trap (remember the literate programming movement). PL's are better described as "Specifications". More similar to file format specifications, later converted to executables or interpreted. > the researchers showed them snippets of code and asked them to predict what action the code would produce. That is only (a small) part of…
I run a YouTube channel that's mostly devoted to reading code: https://www.youtube.com/@ants_are_everywhere I (try to) read code from popular open source projects. It's a bit like sight reading in music because the idea is that I go in blind and try to make sense of it. This rings true to me: > The researchers saw little to no response to code in the language regions of the brain. Instead, they found that the coding…
A (rare enough) person in chronic coma, regaining consciousness on a sedative-hypnotic drug zolpidem, which lasts for a couple of hours as long as the drug is active, can also show parietal lobes (and a bit of dorsal frontal lobes) activation (as showcased probably in Hamilton's Pharmacopoeia in a series on zolpidem).
Thus, according to modern neuroscience and brain imaging, reading code is basically the same as regaining consciousness on zolpidem while in coma.
#426 https://lexfridman.com/podcast/
ETA: I believe Evelina Fedorenko, from this paper, is Edward's wife.