Math is a subset of language, surely.
Probably true. Math used to be written in prose style before we invented symbols to compress the prose. Most of the symbols are very recent just in the last 200 years or so.
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)
#12I 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.
And/or application domain. Lower level programming might lean more on the math side? Wasn't the modulus operator a common complaint about fizz-buzz?
Re: The language brain matters more for programming than the math brain? (2020)
#13Math is a subset of language, surely.
Some types of math benefit a lot from visual reasoning. Like geometry.
Re: The language brain matters more for programming than the math brain? (2020)
#14I 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.
I was thinking about whether it would vary with task, but I think you have a good point and it would vary even more with the language.
Re: The language brain matters more for programming than the math brain? (2020)
#15I 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?
They get it from being an engineer!
Re: The language brain matters more for programming than the math brain? (2020)
#16This mirrors my personal experience. My writing skills have been above average and my parents' presumption was that I would pursue some humanistic studies. I ended up studying software engineering and made a career out of it of almost three decades and counting. Meanwhile my wife who always had a "math brain" has struggled to learn to program at a decent competency level.
Re: The language brain matters more for programming than the math brain? (2020)
#17Math is a subset of language, surely.
Some types of math benefit a lot from visual reasoning. Like geometry.
Geometry only benefits from visual reasoning in 3d and lower, and there are a lot of dimensions above that!
You can see visual reasoning as a little cheat computation, you can run math problems through your sense-determining brain, which is what brains are really good at (robots struggle with our levels of dexterity). But the fact remains that you can only visualize in low dimensions, and there are infinitely many dimensions.
Note: You can reduce many problems to 3d, but also many problems in 3d have configuration spaces with much higher dimension, so there's some nuance.
Re: The language brain matters more for programming than the math brain? (2020)
#18Interestingly, I became better at learning human languages after learning a couple of programming languages. I was good at math at the beginning. I guess programming kinda bridged the gap.
Re: The language brain matters more for programming than the math brain? (2020)
#19Programming education should have more humanities such as writing, sociology, epistemology and design, and not nearly as much maths.
Re: The language brain matters more for programming than the math brain? (2020)
#20I 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.
I would take the other side of the bet.