I would agree. Linguistics and literature have always been a strong interest of mine, and many computer scientists. Moreso, I find weaker programmers struggle with spelling, grammar, various dyslexias and torrent-of-thought code organisation.
The language brain matters more for programming than the math brain? (2020)
301–310 of 465 posts
Re: The language brain matters more for programming than the math brain? (2020)
#302Re: The language brain matters more for programming than the math brain? (2020)
#303Of course it does. Math is not programming - it's almost entirely irrelevant to programming and certainly to software and architecture development. Most modern programming only involves math for trivial things like counting.
This classic article explains the real issue - like Mike Gancarz' classic on the Unix Philosophy, this is something all younger hackers should read, but few have, since these are the fundamental ideas that have created our modern world of computers: https://web.archive.org/web/20000529125023/http://www.wenet....
Re: The language brain matters more for programming than the math brain? (2020)
#304Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Isn't the primary purpose of math to describe the world around us? No, that's Physics[0]. I joke that "Physics is the subset of mathematics that reflects the observable world." This is also a jab at String Theorists[1]. Physicists use math, but that doesn't mean it is math. It's not the only language at their disposal nor do they use all of math. > software engineering has nothing to do with mathematical abstractio…
> No, that's Physics Going on a total tangent, if you'll forgive me, and I ask purely as a curious outsider: do you think math could have ever come into being if it weren't to fill the human need of describing and categorizing the world? What would have been the very beginning of math, the first human thought, or word or action, that could be called "math"? Are you able to picture this?
> do you think math could have ever come into being if it weren't to fill the human need of describing and categorizing the world?
But my confusion is because I'm having a difficult time thinking where such things aren't also necessary consequences of just being a living being in general. I cannot think of a single creature that does not also have some world model, even if that model is very poor. My cat understands physics and math, even though her understandings are quite naive (also Wittgenstein[1] is quite wrong. I can understand my cat, even if not completely and even though she has a much harder time understanding me). More naive than say the Greeks, but they were also significantly more naive than your average math undergrad and I wouldn't say the Greeks "didn't do math".
It necessitates a threshold value and I'm not sure that this is useful framing. At least until we have a mutual understanding of what threshold we're concerned with. Frankly, we often place these contrived thresholds/barriers in continuous processes. They can be helpful but they also lead to a lot of confusion.
> What would have been the very beginning of math
I could say when the some of the Greeks got tired of arguing with people who were just pulling shit out of their asses, but that'd ignore many times other civilizations independently did the same.
I could say when the first conscious creature arose (I don't know when this was). It needed to understand itself (an object) and its relationship to others. Other creatures, other things, other... objects.
I could also say the first living creature. As I said above, even a bad world model has some understanding that there are objects and relationships between them.
I could also say it always was. But then we get into a "tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it" type of thing (also with the prior one). Acoustic vibrations is a fine definition, but so is "what one hears".
I'd more put the line closer to "Greeks" (and probably conscious). The reason for this is formalization, and I think this is a sufficient point where there's near universal agreement. In quotes because I'll accept any point in time that can qualify with the intended distinction, which is really hard to pin-point. I'm certainly not a historian nor remotely qualified to point to a reasonable time lol. But this also seems to be a point in history often referenced as being near "the birth" and frankly I'm more interested in other questions/topics than really getting to the bottom of this one. It also seems unprovable, and I'm okay with that. I'm not so certain it matters when that happened.
To clarify, I do not think life itself necessitates this type of formalization though. I'm unsure what conditions are necessary for this to happen (as an ML researcher I am concerned with this question though), but it does seem the be a natural consequence of a sufficient level of intelligence.
I'll put it this way, if we meet an alien creature I would be astonished if they did not have math. I have no reason to believe that their math would look remotely similar to ours, and I do think there would be difficulties in communicating, but if we both understand Poincare's meaning then it'll surely make that process easier.
Sorry, I know that was long and probably confusing. I just don't have a great answer. Certainly I don't know the answer either. So all I can give are some of my thoughts.
[0] https://www.inference.vc/causal-inference-3-counterfactuals/
Re: The language brain matters more for programming than the math brain? (2020)
#305Earlier quoted context omitted.
A programmer constructs a function from some data type to another while a mathematician constructs a function from witnesses of some proposition to another? Though interpreting a CRUD app as a theorem (or collection of theorems) doesn’t result in an interesting theorem, and interpreting a typical theorem as a program… well, sometimes the result would be a useful program, but often it wouldn’t be.
Interpreting a CRUD apps (or fragments of them) as theorems is interesting (given a programming language and culture that doesn't suck)! e.g. if you have a function `A => ZIO[Any,Nothing,B]`, then you have reasonable certainty that barring catastrophic events like the machine going OOM or encountering a hardware failure (essentially, things that happen outside of the programming model), that given an A, you can run s…
> It's not the type of thing that gets mathematicians excited
> You can often blindly code your way through things by just following the type signatures and having a vague sense of what you want to accomplish.
> in practice, CRUD apps are basically a trivial loop around a dispatcher into a bunch of simple functions operating on bounded data
Re: The language brain matters more for programming than the math brain? (2020)
#306This 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…
> 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).
This is me and also many of the CS students in my cohort, and AFAIK something that universities actively selected for, and students also self-selected around in an era of RTFM/MUDs/IRC before LLMs or youtube. The best programmers I've worked with are still always very linguistically brained.. polyglots even when they didn't have to be, or with a long track record of engaging with difficult literature. If nothing else.. just very witty in that certain way that's meta-cognitive, meta-linguistic.
This is still true I think but it's much harder see out in the wild due to the degree/career trajectory popularity. Plus as long we're optimizing for leet-coding even though built-from-scratch algorithms are a very rare need compared to skills with good design/exposition.. naturally the math-brain is favored.
Re: The language brain matters more for programming than the math brain? (2020)
#307Earlier quoted context omitted.
Math major here. 'is' is a reflexive relationship. If math is language, therefore language is math. I believe clearly language is not math, therefore math is not language. Math is described with language, Math itself is not language. It is a 'has-a' relationship vs a 'is-a' relationship.
> Math major here Forgive me if I doubt, but your comment would strongly suggest otherwise, along with this one[0]. The reason for doubt is a failure in fairly basic logic. Your claim is: ¬(A ↦ B) ⟹ ¬(B ↦ A) I'd expect anyone willing to claim the title of "math major" is aware of structures other than bijections and isomorphisms. The mapping operator doesn't form an abelian group. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/ite…
The word "is", typically refers to the logical equals operator (written as "="). Let A = Math, and let B = Language, the phrase "Math is Language" is therefore "A = B". My claim is that "B != A", which implies "A != B" because "!=" is reflexive. "A != B" then contradicts the claim "A = B". In words: because "language is not math", therefore it cannot be true that "math is language".
This is not number theory, not set theory, just logic. I don't see how the properties of Abelian groups applies. I do suspect that non-abelian groups is a case where "¬(A ↦ B) ⟹ ¬(B ↦ A)" is false, and would be a contadiction to my counter claim if "¬(A ↦ B) ⟹ ¬(B ↦ A)" was my counter-claim. No, my counter claim is simply that because "B != A" therefore "A != B"
The statement "¬(A ↦ B) ⟹ ¬(B ↦ A)" is quite different, and I'm not 100% sure whether you are mixing set and logic notations? [0][1] It does seem you are bringing in number theory concepts, or we are misunderstanding one another?
I assume "↦" is the set mapping operator and "⟹" is logical implies, and "¬" is logical not. "¬(A ↦ B) ⟹ ¬(B ↦ A)" could potentially be phrased as: "If the element A cannot be mapped to B, then the element B cannot be mapped to A". I would agree that statement is not 'generally' true. Could you please clarify so we are not talking past each other.
[0] Per google: The symbol "↦" is a mapping symbol, typically used to indicate a function or relationship where one element maps to another. It's not a standard logical operator in the same way that symbols like &&, ||, or ¬ are. Instead, it represents a directional relationship between sets or elements, often seen in set theory and mathematical notations
Re: The language brain matters more for programming than the math brain? (2020)
#308[deleted]
Re: The language brain matters more for programming than the math brain? (2020)
#309Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Math is a language. Language is not math, therefore math is not language.
Logic doesn't follow. There is no problem with A -> B ∧ B -/-> A Here's an example. "I live in San Francisco" would imply "I live in the US". But "I live in the US" does not mean "I live in San Francisco". Here's a more formal representation of this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bijection,_injection_and_surje...
The word "is", maps to the logical "equals" operator. I agree with the example, but I don't agree it is relevant. There is no implies operator.
The statement "Math is Language", where A is Math and B is Language, maps to the logical assertion: "A = B".
If we are going to really be kinda twisty and non-standard, we could interpret the english "is" to be "is an equivalence class of". Which would map to your example pretty well: language is indeed an equivalence class of math, but math is not an equivalence class of language. Though, nobody is talking about implies operator or equivalence class here.. It's a "is" relationship, logical *equals*
Re: The language brain matters more for programming than the math brain? (2020)
#310[deleted]