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I find that I'm able to start writing a language and learn its grammar fairly quickly, but once I have to listen and converse in it it's like a whole different ballpark.
As someone who is fluently bilingual and speaks a third language and is also proficient or better in a half dozen programming languages along with having written code in many more, this is completely obvious to me. Learning a programming language is much closer to learning a complex board game than it is a natural language.
I was originally surprised by the study and your comment, since I generally find no difference between natural languages , math and programming languages. (I am a math major). However, most of the people I interact with find my exposition methods curious in sense of structure. So, I shared this study with some of my friends, and they agreed with the study too. When I pointed out my surprise to them, they told me that…
They name Python and ScratchJr, but no hints on what spoken languages were examined. I've been told Chinese and Japanese are much closer than Romance languages to code.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I feel exactly the same, I've been learning a second language and it's nothing like learning programming, in fact arguably the opposite, I've found that obsessing over grammar is almost detrimental to making progress with a new language. The confident students who aren't concerned with getting all the specifics of grammar exactly perfect are the ones that are making the most progress toward being conversational, they…
Interesting. I feel like coding is not that dissimilar. In the early phases of learning a new coding language, I learn how to write lines of code. Sometimes it compiles, most of the time it would cause errors. At some point it works, but a more seasoned engineer could easily find places to refactor it in order to make it more extensible/flexible, easier to read, less brittle, and most importantly to this discussion o…
As someone who is fluently bilingual and speaks a third language and is also proficient or better in a half dozen programming languages along with having written code in many more, this is completely obvious to me. Learning a programming language is much closer to learning a complex board game than it is a natural language.
It's only briefly mentioned, but learning to read music is quite similar in terms of brain function to learning programming. It's symbolic, logical and structured. My university went so far as to allow students with a bachelor's degree in music to directly enter the computer science master's program.
In the early days of computing (that is, when computer companies and universities were finding the first people to learn programming) music experience was a strong signal for programming ability! Playing music prepared them for focusing on the low-level details while holding the big picture in their head. [0] [0] The Dream Machine by Waldrop
As someone who is fluently bilingual and speaks a third language and is also proficient or better in a half dozen programming languages along with having written code in many more, this is completely obvious to me. Learning a programming language is much closer to learning a complex board game than it is a natural language.
Your comment is insightful and suggests that perhaps we should try to design a programming language that feels more like a natural language.
As someone who is fluently bilingual and speaks a third language and is also proficient or better in a half dozen programming languages along with having written code in many more, this is completely obvious to me. Learning a programming language is much closer to learning a complex board game than it is a natural language.
Your comment is insightful and suggests that perhaps we should try to design a programming language that feels more like a natural language.
One thing I've noticed is that I can type out code at the same time I'm singing a song aloud. If I tried to do that while writing English, I'd start typing whatever I'm singing.