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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)

#31

Post by jp57 »

philipkglass wrote: post #7
jp57 wrote: post #3

After 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…

In order to solve what are essentially "word problems" -- i.e. reading a verbal description of a problem and translating it to math -- you have to have very good reading comprehension.

Re: The language brain matters more for programming than the math brain? (2020)

#32

Post by Jtsummers »

p0nce wrote: post #19

Programming education should have more humanities such as writing, sociology, epistemology and design, and not nearly as much maths.

How much math is in a typical CS program these days? Calc 1-3 (maybe 3, varied by school), Linear Algebra, Statistics (inconsistent across programs), Discrete were pretty much it when I was in school 25+ years or so ago. That's only 4-6 courses depending on the university, though some where the CS dept was more strongly associated with an engineering college might have added Diff Eq and others. (I got interested in CS education and reviewed a lot of curricula in the US at the time, this is from memory.)

Some schools like MIT might have required more, but on average what I wrote was about it. Has it increased since then? Based on the new hires I've seen the last decade I'd have guessed the math requirements were mostly the same.

Re: The language brain matters more for programming than the math brain? (2020)

#35

Post by ivape »

odyssey7 wrote: post #28

And yet CS grad programs seem to care about only the math section of the GRE

Societally we made that association, so it's not the programs fault, they simply live the same world we live in.

Kurt Vonnegut: See, I came up through a chemistry department.

Charlie Rose: Yeah, right.

Kurt Vonnegut: And so I wrote and there was nobody there to tell me whether it was any good or not. I was just making my soul grow, writing stories.

There's some stuff about his opinion on training for writing that could be relevant:

https://charlierose.com/videos/25437

I don't think it's fair to attribute anything to anything. Stuff comes from all over the place. In other words, attributing programming prowess to math was a mistake, and we are making the same mistake again attributing it to language.

---

Just one more:

Kurt Vonnegut: --consider himself in competition with a world's champion. And this is one reason good writers are unlikely to come from an English Department. It's because the English Department teaches you good taste too early.

I think his main point is when we put something on a pedestal, we actually limit people, whether that be math or language.

Re: The language brain matters more for programming than the math brain? (2020)

#36

Post by deeThrow94 »

100% agree, I've been saying this for years. I'm terrible with arithmetic but great with symbols and relations. Recursion is also fundamentally linguistic, and although our internal "stacks" for processing it naturally are quite small, language remains the easiest demonstration of recursion in our daily lives.

Oddly, I also use spatial intuition when thinking about stuff like stacks and the shape of data structures.

Re: The language brain matters more for programming than the math brain? (2020)

#38

Post by karmakaze »

deeThrow94 wrote: post #36

100% agree, I've been saying this for years. I'm terrible with arithmetic but great with symbols and relations. Recursion is also fundamentally linguistic, and although our internal "stacks" for processing it naturally are quite small, language remains the easiest demonstration of recursion in our daily lives. Oddly, I also use spatial intuition when thinking about stuff like stacks and the shape of data structures.

> Recursion is also fundamentally linguistic

You sure about that? How about inductive proofs?

I would just say that language is more familiar to most. Mathematics are also languages, but more formal and foreign to most.

Re: The language brain matters more for programming than the math brain? (2020)

#39

Post by deeThrow94 »

QuercusMax wrote: post #9
jboggan wrote: post #6

I 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.

I'm a terrible speller; it's taken me ten years of typing "ammend" to learn its proper spelling. It also sort of goes against the "programmers are lazy" meme: why memorize what a computer can detect and correct?

Re: The language brain matters more for programming than the math brain? (2020)

#40

Post by armchairhacker »

Good code doesn’t just solve a problem, it solves it in a way that’s readable and modular.

I think the problem-solving part of coding requires math skills, while the organization part requires writing skills. The organization part affects the problem-solving part, because if you write messy code (that you can’t reread once you forget or extend without rewriting) you’ll quickly get overwhelmed.

Writing large math proofs also requires organization skills, since you’ll refer to earlier sections of your proof and may have to modify it when you encounter issues. But to me, math seems to have more “big steps”: sudden insights that can’t be derived from writing (“how did you discover this?”), and concepts that are intrinsically complicated so one can’t really explain them no matter how well they can write. Whereas programming has more “small steps”: even someone who’s not smart (but has grit) can write an impressive program, if they write one component at a time and there aren’t too many components that rely on each other.

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