Having fumed for years about the too-often poor state of software documentation and program comments, I was not surprised by the result, although it was nice to

Having fumed for years about the too-often poor state of software documentation and program comments, I was not surprised by the result, although it was nice to see it proved. What did surprise me, though, was the lack of similarity to mathematical thinking. Was, this, though, because they used fairly simple snippets of Python, a programming language which is not very mathematical in its notation? Would a different result have been obtained had they asked the subjects to reason about a multithreaded C++ program which copiously used autoincrementing pointers and polymorphism? And, can personal preferences in programming languages be partly down to which parts of their brains people like to use? And, as the problems were simple, the study doesn't say anything about expert programmers. Is the often-quoted 10× difference between the best and worst programmers associated with the best ones also involving the mathematical and linguistic parts of their brains? It's probably not practical to measure programming at a high level (or indeed violin playing at a high level) inside an MRI machine, given the cramped and noisy conditions, so we may not have answers to the interesting questions raised any time soon.