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The language brain matters more for programming than the math brain? (2020)
311–320 of 465 posts
Re: The language brain matters more for programming than the math brain? (2020)
#312Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Math is language. Facts. I think it is hard to disagree with this, and it seems like a rare opinion to be held by people at high levels. > Language is the image of reality. An image?[0] ;) [0] https://ncatlab.org/nlab/show/image
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.
You say that like you think it's a qualification?
You're not making it look good. A common use of be is to express set membership rather than identity. For example, "two is an even number" or "tigers are cats".
We may hope that one day you'll come to realize that set membership is not reflexive, and - more to the point - also not symmetric.
Re: The language brain matters more for programming than the math brain? (2020)
#313Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
> This is not number theory, not set theory, just logic.
Try that in a philosophy class and you can expect an F.
A math class too.
Re: The language brain matters more for programming than the math brain? (2020)
#314If we distinguish between form and content: Mathematics = form; language = content. However, mathematics is only one type of form, and subject-predicate-object grammar also belongs to form, yet grammar falls under language.
For example: "Matter determines consciousness." If we apply first-principles thinking—where does matter come from? This statement then becomes: "XXX created matter, and matter determines consciousness." At this point, our interest shifts to the first-principle subject "XXX," focusing our attention on it. Who is XXX? God?
In this thought process, we use the subject-predicate-object grammatical structure to trace back the original subject "matter" in "matter determines consciousness"—where does matter come from? Although this formal reasoning does not involve specific mathematical formulas, it indeed employs formal logic to uncover a flaw and opens the door to deeper rabbit-hole
Re: The language brain matters more for programming than the math brain? (2020)
#315This 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…
Early, strong reader here. Off-the-charts spatial reasoning, as measured by tests. Terrible at math, I hate it and feel dyslexic trying to read most mathematical writing. I excelled at it in elementary school, then quickly came to feel frustratingly stupid at it as it became less about algorithms (more on that in a bit...) and all about equations and abstract stuff with unknown applications. However, programming was…
Very interesting, as I am nearly the opposite. Bad spatial reasoning though pretty good at most other things. In school, geometry was fun and interesting - I enjoyed proofs. And I majored in English in college with a CS minor, so I think there must be a variety of in-roads for programming.
I think one "verbal" skill that has served me well is fast reading. When I had to read a 300 page novel once a week you learn how to skim for key elements, which is immensively useful for getting up to speed in a new codebase/language or locating a bug.
Re: The language brain matters more for programming than the math brain? (2020)
#316Good 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 proo…
> Good code doesn’t just solve a problem, it solves it in a way that’s readable and modular.
Strongly disagree.
There are plenty of cases where non-modular code is more readable and faster than modular code (littered, presumably, with invocations of modular logic).
There are also countless cases, particularly in low-level languages or languages with manual memory management, where the best solution -- or the correct solution -- is far from readable.
Readability is anyways in the eye of the beholder (My code is readable. Isn't yours?) and takes a back seat to formal requirements.
Just as a matter of personal style, I prefer long, well-organized functions that are minimally modular. In my experience, context changes -- file boundaries, new function contexts, etc -- are the single greatest source of complexity and bugs, once one has shipped a piece of code and needs to maintain it or build on it. Modular code, by multiplying those, tends to obscure complexity and augment organizational problems by making them harder to reason about and fix. Longer functions certainty feel less readable initially but I'd wager they produce better, clearer mental models, leading to better solutions.
Re: The language brain matters more for programming than the math brain? (2020)
#317Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Coding IS math. No, not always. Quite a lot of high-level code doesn't require any math at all. It doesn't take math to perform CRUD operations, which account for a lot of programming work. Sure, the underlying machine code is all based on math, but the higher level programming doesn't need to involve a single math equation for it to be useful. Let's see where the goalposts move now...
> It doesn't take math to perform CRUD operation Yes it does. Just because the objects you are working with aren't numbers doesn't mean it isn't math. In fact, that's my entire point. It is why I quoted Poincare in the first place. He didn't say "numbers" he said "objects".
Sorry but you are wrong. "CREATE, READ, UPDATE, DELETE" operations are not mathematical in nature. It doesn't matter what the data is or how esoteric you want to get with it - a programmer doesn't need any math at all for simple CRUD. You're trying to move the goalposts all the way back to the 1800s to win a pointless internet argument.
Re: The language brain matters more for programming than the math brain? (2020)
#318Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Coding IS math. No, not always. Quite a lot of high-level code doesn't require any math at all. It doesn't take math to perform CRUD operations, which account for a lot of programming work. Sure, the underlying machine code is all based on math, but the higher level programming doesn't need to involve a single math equation for it to be useful. Let's see where the goalposts move now...
All of that code is a series of logical statements and expressions. Mathematical logic. But the CRUD logic is so basic and boring, so obvious, that it doesn't require any thought.
>All of that code is a series of logical statements and expressions. Mathematical logic.
Which code? The machine code that underlies everything? Or the lines of simple high-level CRUD that don't even need a single number or logic statement to function? Not all programming has to be mathematical or even logical at a high enough level, and I say this as someone who's been coding assembly language for 40 years.
Re: The language brain matters more for programming than the math brain? (2020)
#319Earlier quoted context omitted.
Most coding doesn't need much of any math past boolean logic and very basic set operations. I'm much more likely to spend my time studying DB and interface schemas to understand how something works than doing a lot of mathy fiddling. Sure, some people write game engines and such, but even much of 3D graphics doesn't need anything more complicated than the first half of a linear algebra course.
> Most coding doesn't need much of any math past boolean logic and very basic set operations Coding IS math. Not "coding uses math", I mean it is math. Mathematicians do not deal in objects, but in relations among objects; they are free to replace some object by others so long as the relations remain unchanged. Content to them is irrelevant; they are interested in form only. - Poincare[0] I don't know how you code, b…
forming relationships between objects
This is vague and doesn't mean anything. People can't even agree what 'objects' are and people did a lot of programming before the term 'object' was invented.
Programming is about is fundamentally about instructions and data. Yin and yang of two things that are completely different, even if people can occasionally mix them and conflate them.
Re: The language brain matters more for programming than the math brain? (2020)
#320There is no such thing as a "language brain" or a "math brain" unless you show experimentally that those bunch of neurons can be grouped into two non-overlapping regions dedicated to "language" and "mathematics". Mathematics itself is a human-made formal language that can be bootstrapped from definitions and axioms of logics and set theory, which have to be given in human language first. Experienced mathematicians re…
> unless you show experimentally that those bunch of neurons can be grouped into two non-overlapping regions
A good place to look is after brain trauma. Where people end up with weird missing functionality.
Oliver Sacks writes about some of the weird side effects of brain trauma.
We could experiment on mathematicians or writers by causing trauma to different parts of the brain...
Or neural stimulation/anaesthetic of brain regions might show something.