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Wow! I like this. "Cognitive fluency" is a concept that I've felt should exist for a long time (but, amusingly, have had no words to describe). It's a reason wh
by lincolnq 17y ago
Wow! I like this. "Cognitive fluency" is a concept that I've felt should exist for a long time (but, amusingly, have had no words to describe). It's a reason why I believe in the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity).
Cognitive fluency has a lot of relevance for programming languages research. From the article: "When people read something in a difficult-to-read font, they unwittingly transfer that sense of difficulty onto the topic they’re reading about." Wow -- similarly, the programming language you're writing in might have an even bigger effect on what programs you find easy to create or think about.
- jerf 17y agoSeems like that would be a counterexample to Sapir-Whorf, not evidence. You clearly had an idea but not a word; language did not bound your ideation. (I don't accept it, at least not in its strong form, pretty much for this reason; one way of looking at my programming job is nailing down concepts before they have names, then giving them names only later. There's some useful idea there, but Sapir-Whorf overstates it.)