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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)

#361

Post by dmos62 »

My take on skills related to programming is that it's a dance between writing skills and working memory. I've measurably bad working memory, which had led to compensation with writing skills, which led to a programming style that's fairly disciplined and focused on "wholesome" readability. A downside is that I still struggle interacting with code that's written by the working-memory-oriented programmers.

I've recently taken up a daily practice to improve my cognitive skills. Currently I'm using NeuroNation, and it is quite great. The stimulus to start the practice was getting my memory tested (clinically) and learning that it's below norm.

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

#362

Post by hdkdicnsnjes »

lo_zamoyski wrote: post #150
godelski wrote: post #113

It think this is silly on multiple accounts. I'll claim that there's not real thing such as a "language brain" or "math brain." I'll also claim that most people don't know what math is, and that their evidence supports a "math brain". Math isn't about calculations/computations, it is about patterns. You get to algebra and think "what are these letters doing in my math" but once you get further you think "what are the…

Math is about form and traditionally the science of quantity. It is called a formal science for this reason. Language also concerns form. Grammar has form. Concepts are forms. Math is language. 'Everything' is language. Language is the image of reality. In the beginning was the Logos...

Real

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

#363

Post by john-h-k »

Has anyone here actually read the paper? Heavily clickbait headline, completely exaggerating the study results, which themselves are not very rigorous (to be generous)

Tiny sample size - 36 people completed

Numeracy has R^2 = .27 Language has R^2 = .31

They then run stepwise regression to determine variance contributions, seemingly ignoring their earlier results, and this leads to almost no contribution from numeracy. Why? Because they have ~10% shared variance and stepwise regression is greedy - will just take whatever you give it first.

I can't mention this part enough. If you got a second, very similar language test, and added it to the model, you would _also_ find it has almost no unique variance added.

Every thing they measure is incredibly noisy and they do not once attempt to deal with this. Human based reviewers, time-to-completion, etc.

p-value for "language learning is more significant than numeracy" on the values they give (Steiger test) gives 0.772. Utterly insignificant.

Also, to beat the point home, just think about the argument here: * Numeracy contributes 27% of variance

* Language skills contribute 31% of variance

* After regression step, numeracy contributes only 2% of unique variance. Because you added a correlated variable!

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

#364

Post by john-h-k »

TheGrognardling wrote: post #160

I certainly don’t dispute the empirical validity of the findings from the study - but there are important nuances to consider as well. I am certainly more naturally-attuned to languages as-far as language-learning and reading than mathematics, but I have also found myself understanding more mathematical and theoretical linguistics as well. I also love programming. It wasn’t until high school, when I tested-into the h…

> I certainly don’t dispute the empirical validity of the findings from the study

You absolutely should. Tiny sample size and poor statistical method. It is p-hacking plain and simple

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

#365

Post by ndriscoll »

leptons wrote: post #317
godelski wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

A while back I made this[0] as a quick demo of generic batching for CRUD requests. It's very much practically oriented (it's for performance optimization while making the code nicely reusable/not muddying up the business logic), but also felt quite a bit like the same sort of things I did in my math degree.

Actually I'm starting to wonder whether the thing that made university math easy for me was I quickly developed a good internal "type checker"/"type inference engine" in my head, and that helped make the next steps of proofs seem straightforward.

[0] https://gist.github.com/ndriscoll/881c4f5f0398039a3a74543450...

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

#366

Post by gitroom »

Honestly, all this "math brain" vs "language brain" stuff just feels off to me - I've always been more of a pattern and abstraction person anyway. Makes me wonderif schools focused more on teaching real abstract thinking early, would way more kids just "get" programming without even stressing over math class?

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

#368

Post by ezekiel68 »

QuercusMax wrote: post #8

This 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 came here to comment the same -- also ready to share my SAT scores from the 1980s. I was also much highter on the verbal side and I have had an awesome software engineering career using many, many languages (often together) on large, professional projects at large companies anybody here would recognize.

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

#369

Post by bitzun »

albertoCaroM wrote: post #349

Although the study by Prat et al. (2020) suggests that linguistic aptitude is a better predictor than numeracy for learning programming in Python, it should be read carefully, as it can easily be oversimplified. To begin with, the study measures functional numeracy: the ability to solve everyday numerical problems. This is quite different from the kind of advanced mathematics often associated with programming, such a…

This reads like an LLM wrote it.

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

#370

Post by SanjayMehta »

john-h-k wrote: post #363

Has anyone here actually read the paper? Heavily clickbait headline, completely exaggerating the study results, which themselves are not very rigorous (to be generous) Tiny sample size - 36 people completed Numeracy has R^2 = .27 Language has R^2 = .31 They then run stepwise regression to determine variance contributions, seemingly ignoring their earlier results, and this leads to almost no contribution from numeracy…

It reads like an ad for something.
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