The language brain matters more for programming than the math brain? (2020)
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Re: The language brain matters more for programming than the math brain? (2020)
#2I wonder if this finding hold across programming languages. I suspect the conclusions would be different for people programming in APL instead of Python, for example.
Re: The language brain matters more for programming than the math brain? (2020)
#3After I started my PhD program in CS/AI (late 90's), one of the faculty told me that the GRE verbal score was thing on the application most predictive of student success in the program. Of course, most applicants had perfect or near perfect GRE math scores, so there was no predictive power there. But the application also included the GRE subject test, transcripts, and letters of recommendation.
Re: The language brain matters more for programming than the math brain? (2020)
#4After I started my PhD program in CS/AI (late 90's), one of the faculty told me that the GRE verbal score was thing on the application most predictive of student success in the program. Of course, most applicants had perfect or near perfect GRE math scores, so there was no predictive power there. But the application also included the GRE subject test, transcripts, and letters of recommendation.
The GRE math bar for excellence was quite low and so a perfect score was only the 92nd percentile or so. It’s not surprising that other metrics correlated better with success
Re: The language brain matters more for programming than the math brain? (2020)
#5Math is a subset of language, surely.
Re: The language brain matters more for programming than the math brain? (2020)
#6I have found a fairly interesting correlation between people who are good at learning programming and people who are good at English spelling bees. Something about holding a lot of anecdotes and esoteric rule exceptions when performing an otherwise algorithmic process.
Re: The language brain matters more for programming than the math brain? (2020)
#7After I started my PhD program in CS/AI (late 90's), one of the faculty told me that the GRE verbal score was thing on the application most predictive of student success in the program. Of course, most applicants had perfect or near perfect GRE math scores, so there was no predictive power there. But the application also included the GRE subject test, transcripts, and letters of recommendation.
I also seem to recall from The Making of the Atomic Bomb that the theoretical physicists of the era were noted as having the highest verbal intelligence of any group of scientists. That struck me since I would not have expected it.
EDIT: I found the quote, from chapter 6:
Psychometricians have closely questioned American scientists of this first modern generation, curious to know what kind of men they were—there were few women among them—and from what backgrounds they emerged. Small liberal arts colleges in the Middle West and on the Pacific coast, one study found, were most productive of scientists then (by contrast, New England in the same period excelled at the manufacture of lawyers).
...
Theoretical physicists averaged the highest verbal IQs among all scientists studied, clustering around 170, almost 20 percent higher than the experimentalists. Theoreticians also averaged the highest spatial IQs, experimentalists ranking second.
Re: The language brain matters more for programming than the math brain? (2020)
#8This totally makes sense to me. I've always been a very good / fast reader, which has been incredibly useful in my programming career. I had a good SAT math score (710) but got a perfect score (800) on the SAT verbal (in the late 90s).
I remember when I first started working on my Master's project on wireless sensor networks, my advisor sat me down and said "I think I know a good project for you. I want you to print out the source code for TinyOS, study it for a week, and come back to me when you think you know enough to make these changes." This was a sort of formative experience for me, and ever since when joining a new project I made sure to take the time to read through the code to understand how things fit together.
Re: The language brain matters more for programming than the math brain? (2020)
#9I have found a fairly interesting correlation between people who are good at learning programming and people who are good at English spelling bees. Something about holding a lot of anecdotes and esoteric rule exceptions when performing an otherwise algorithmic process.
Makes sense to me; I've always been a naturally good English speller. My brain just knows how to store and retrieve this type of data, which has a high correlation with e.g. CLI interfaces and their idiosyncratic command structures.
Re: The language brain matters more for programming than the math brain? (2020)
#10I have found a fairly interesting correlation between people who are good at learning programming and people who are good at English spelling bees. Something about holding a lot of anecdotes and esoteric rule exceptions when performing an otherwise algorithmic process.
Are you a teacher and/or someone that runs spelling bees or otherwise someone that has done the proper statistics to distinguish this correlation with generalised intelligence. Just wondering where you get this anecdata from?