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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)

#71

Post by School-Cotton »

retrac wrote: post #43
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.

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.

Yes, but “language is fundamentally recursive” doesn’t mean the same thing as “recursion is fundamentally linguistic”. Language is just one example of a recursive structure.

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

#73

Post by taeric »

I'm strong in the belief that kids having lower reading scores is directly related to lower math scores. Learning to decode words is directly translatable to learning to decode equations. Down to some of my favorite math passages would include how to read something as it introduces a symbol or other construct.

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

#74

Post by tapoxi »

alabastervlog wrote: post #67
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…

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…

Same but I am literally math dyslexic (formal diagnosis of dyscalculia).

It prevented me from having a CS degree, I was unable to complete the math courses, but as far as actual programming and "software engineering" goes (design, etc) it's never hindered me. I can work out the logic and I let the computer do the math.

Edit: I'm downvoted below zero for this comment. I don't know what people are so offended by?

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

#75

Post by School-Cotton »

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.

It kinda is empirically true that human language is recursive. Every human language ever discovered is recursive, except, supposedly, for one: Pirahã. And Pirahã has mainly been described by one researcher whose results are controversial.

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

#77

Post by darkerside »

Couldn't this difference be explained by the fact that the lessons were in English? If your language skills are poor, it's going to be hard to read the directions. You'll definitely be slower, which was the primary finding around language.

That side, I wonder if early programming was much more math heavy, and higher level languages have successively reduced that need over time.

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

#78

Post by jll29 »

There 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 read formal theorems written in Greek letters off their blackboards as if it was normal English, suggesting they think about it like it was just normal English. This is not to say they cannot also view in front of their mental eye visual representations isomorphic with that language if they chose to.

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

#79

Post by 77pt77 »

shayneo wrote: post #70

As a self taught programmer with a Communication Studies degree, this definitely resonates. The ability to articulate the problem in code is kind of the starting point for most productive development work.

Any experienced programmer will be able to tell what kind of person another programmer is just by the way they write their code.

Code written by programmers with humanities backgrounds is easily identifiable as being of bad quality.

Kind of like vibe coding meets programming by accident, before vibe coding was really a term.

It's a faux pas to even mention this IRL, but good coders know what's up.

Those "coders" usually get promoted to people managers, which is usually what they want anyway because their self-worth relies on abusing others to mitigate the correct self-perception they have of being "inferior".

The problem is, things need to be solved and vibe+accident programming can only go so far.

But fear not, they can always scapegoat whoever solves the problems, because if they were not to blame, how could they know what was up or even feel the need to correct it?

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

#80

Post by hbn »

School-Cotton wrote: post #68
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 What does this mean exactly?

>> Recursion is also fundamentally linguistic

> What does this mean exactly?

What does this mean exactly?

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