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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)

#41

Post by deeThrow94 »

karmakaze wrote: post #38
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.

How do you communicate an inductive proof without language? Even formal symbolic logic is fundamentally linguistic.

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

#42

Post by deeThrow94 »

karmakaze wrote: post #37

This says more about our programming languages than it does about the brain. I've always wondered why FP isn't more popular. I concluded it's because most folks don't like thinking like abstract math.

I can't speak for other forms of FP, but symbol operators make communicating about haskell very annoying. Outside of that FP seems to be doing fine, IMO.

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

#43

Post by retrac »

karmakaze wrote: post #38
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.

Language has an inherently recursive structure: I saw the man who saw the man who saw the man who saw the man who saw the man who... While our brains have practical limits to how deeply such things can actually be nested, language has a recursive tree-like aspect to it.

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

#44

Post by DiscourseFan »

deeThrow94 wrote: post #41
karmakaze wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

How do you communicate an inductive proof without language? Even formal symbolic logic is fundamentally linguistic.

Recursion itself is simply a conjecture. Nothing fundamental about it unless you believe Chomsky, but his is a speculative claim, not empirical per se.

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

#45

Post by flkiwi »

I tell people all the time that the single greatest tool an aspiring lawyer can have is a background with programming, as the analytical and algorithmic mindset is FAR more important than being "good at public speaking" or any of the other base skills often cited as desirable for lawyers. I've also said the second greatest tool an aspiring lawyer can have (in my personal opinion) is a significant background in foreign language learning, as that is a skill that is closely related to programming, though a bit abstracted and coming from a different angle. I'm going to see if I can use this article to support that.

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

#46

Post by DiscourseFan »

bell-cot wrote: post #21
swayvil wrote: post #5

Math is a subset of language, surely.

It's easily argued that languages are subsets of math.

Before Godel, yeah. Many in math departments would like to believe that claim but would not accept it when pressed.

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

#47

Post by deeThrow94 »

Jtsummers wrote: post #32
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 C…

I'd argue none of that math is really necessary. While I have used most of my classes at least once, it was never a barrier to advancement in my career. Hell you could say the same thing about any of the theory. Like yea it's cool I know what a "merkle tree" is but it ultimately is a distraction from most of the skills you need to work with git.

Anyway, both computation and math are grouped under "apriori" knowledge. Any semantic distinction is ultimately silly. But we could just as easily be teaching programming as a craft in the context of the real world—I think this is closer to how it's done outside the US. I am not at all convinced the American style is what people ought to be paying for.

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

#48

Post by trealira »

karmakaze wrote: post #38
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.

This is just a guess on my part, but I'd also bet that writing inductive proofs (or proofs in general) require more of the language brain than just doing math problems.

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

#49

Post by rowanG077 »

The article is extremely misleading, I dare even say almost malignant.

The study itself claims:

- fluid reasoning and working-memory capacity explained 34%

- language aptitude (17%)

- resting-state EEG power in beta and low-gamma bands (10%)

- numeracy (2%)

They take math skills to equal numeracy. The study itself implies this too. I disagree on a fundamental level with that. Math skills align much more closely to fluid reasoning than to numeracy.

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

#50

Post by deeThrow94 »

DiscourseFan wrote: post #44
deeThrow94 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you communicate an inductive proof without language? Even formal symbolic logic is fundamentally linguistic.

Recursion itself is simply a conjecture. Nothing fundamental about it unless you believe Chomsky, but his is a speculative claim, not empirical per se.

I don't really know what you mean by "conjecture", but I thought apriori was implied by positing it as a linguistic construct. "Fundamental" doesn't imply empiricism at all. All of apriori knowledge for a language is a set of all sets of coherent statements: the outer set represents a set of implied axioms required to make the statements cohere. Recursion just broadens the complexity of the statements you can express, but it's fundamentally a concept that arises from language and can be evaluated for coherency (like all other apriori concepts).

Edit: added a definition of apriori knowledge.

Edit2: to put this another way, nobody is arguing that recursion doesn't exist. Or that it is empirically-derived. No, it's a useful construct to show certain relations.

Edit3: added a sentence

Edit4: The extent to which our own grammars are inherently recursive vs this being culture or technology is irrelevant to identifying the concept of recursion as an apriori, linguistic concept.

Edit5: i suppose you might also be referring to the idea that we naturally process recursion. I mean, we clearly, evidently do; whether or not that's inherent to being human is a separate question entirely. Hell in the free software world there's a whole recursive acronym meme that taps into some part of our brain and tickles it.

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