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I know I don't think in code, but rather translate it from English into whatever programming language I'm using. Really? I think the only time I do this is whe

by lemming 15y ago

I know I don't think in code, but rather translate it from English into whatever programming language I'm using. Really? I think the only time I do this is when something is sufficiently tricky that I probably have to draw it to work out what it should be doing ("Ok, so I pass this in here, and then it could flow through to here or here..."). Otherwise, assuming I'm sufficiently fluent in the language I'm programming in it just "flows" out, as when I'm speaking in Spanish (a second language I speak well) - there's no intermediate translation from English in either case.

wccrawford 15y ago
Interesting. I've been disturbed by my inability to stop translating when trying to understand and speak Japanese, but I've also noticed I'm not as bothered by translating as most people seem to be. (Maybe it's a perfectly acceptable trade-off, if it happens fast enough. Or maybe I'm just not there yet.) Coding is the same way... I think "I'll loop over that" and then proceed to write out how to do it in whatever programming language I'm working with. Sometimes I even write comments in English and then go back and fill in the code that does what the comments want.
- nebaneba 15y ago
  > (Maybe it's a perfectly acceptable trade-off, if it happens fast enough. Or maybe I'm just not there yet.) You are not there yet. Here's why. In pre-fluency stages of language acquisition, the taxing part of language parsing is memory retrieval, iow, mapping meaning from language A to language B. If you are well-versed at this, it can happen sufficiently quickly. For example, "a machine with four wheels that brings people places" --> car. After enough practice, you "bypass" the "machine" and retrieve "car" without consciously looking up the word. Imagining that happening for every single word, and every single sentence construction. That's when you're "there". As for coding, there is an easy example: iterative looping vs. map/reduce operations. These can express the logic but are conceptually different: one is to repeatedly track states across some number of times, the other is to apply a transformation function to a set of items. To reuse the car analogy, a looped factory would be like taking parts and assemble 100 cars, and a map factory would be like taking parts and assembling all the wheels, then all the engines, then all the doors and so on.

by lemming 15y ago

wccrawford 15y ago

Interesting. I've been disturbed by my inability to stop translating when trying to understand and speak Japanese, but I've also noticed I'm not as bothered by translating as most people seem to be. (Maybe it's a perfectly acceptable trade-off, if it happens fast enough. Or maybe I'm just not there yet.) Coding is the same way... I think "I'll loop over that" and then proceed to write out how to do it in whatever programming language I'm working with. Sometimes I even write comments in English and then go back and fill in the code that does what the comments want.

nebaneba 15y ago
> (Maybe it's a perfectly acceptable trade-off, if it happens fast enough. Or maybe I'm just not there yet.) You are not there yet. Here's why. In pre-fluency stages of language acquisition, the taxing part of language parsing is memory retrieval, iow, mapping meaning from language A to language B. If you are well-versed at this, it can happen sufficiently quickly. For example, "a machine with four wheels that brings people places" --> car. After enough practice, you "bypass" the "machine" and retrieve "car" without consciously looking up the word. Imagining that happening for every single word, and every single sentence construction. That's when you're "there". As for coding, there is an easy example: iterative looping vs. map/reduce operations. These can express the logic but are conceptually different: one is to repeatedly track states across some number of times, the other is to apply a transformation function to a set of items. To reuse the car analogy, a looped factory would be like taking parts and assemble 100 cars, and a map factory would be like taking parts and assembling all the wheels, then all the engines, then all the doors and so on.