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

I'm very curious what this math pretest looked like, whether it was "proper" high level math or, like, computing some trig problems. Folks who have aptitude with algebra or number theory or topology, I'd expect that to be correlated, but not to rote computational math.

I don't find this too surprising. The study itself was primarily just testing a students ability to identify syntax and remember what various functions do. I wouldn't expect math proficiency to help much in this area vs I would very much expect language to.

It'd be interesting to see correlations (language brain vs math brain) for how easy or hard it is for people to solve new problems with language after they already know the basics.

Those long held assumptions were held by people who aren't professional programmers, right?

Because, if you do what we do, it's obvious that language > math for most of this stuff.

I'd go so far as to say that music > math for programming.

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 natural and easy to pick up. I've repeatedly had to take more time convincing myself I actually understand some supposedly "hard" thing, like pointers or recursion, than it took to learn them in the first place, because they were in fact very easy to understand so I kept second-guessing myself—"I must not get it, because that was easy". I've been the go-to guy for "hard" and "low-level" problems basically everywhere I've worked.

What I've noticed is that when I must read math, the only way I can get any headway is to turn everything into steps, through which some example values may pass and affect one another. I have to turn it all into algorithms. Algorithms, I can get. Attempts to express meaning through equations and proofs, no, I have to painstakingly turn every single boundary between every symbol into a step and "walk through" it to have any hope of understanding it, and once I do, this new understanding only barely illuminates the original representation.

I think programming clicked for me because, as typically encountered and taught, it's very heavy on algorithms and very light on other varieties of mathematical presentation. Plus, having so very much more context available about what variables represent and what routines do, than a jumble of letters and symbols. FFS, if we say Perl is line noise, what's mathematical writing? Straight gibberish from a brain-wrecked Cthulhu cultist? Perl's the clearest thing in the world by comparison!

... where I do run into trouble is languages with "mathy" syntax, where the idiomatic style favors single-letter variables and accomplishing-things-by-asserting-equality. I can't read Haskell to save my life. Put the same supposedly-tricky concepts (monads, type classes) in any more-ordinary language, and it's easy, but when I tried to learn them using Haskell, I couldn't get anywhere at all. Shit, it takes me forever just to understand fizzbuzz-level programs written in Haskell.