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...I wonder if programming-related skills like the ability to work concurrently at multiple levels of abstraction also prevent cognitive decline. Almost certai

by lemming 15y ago

...I wonder if programming-related skills like the ability to work concurrently at multiple levels of abstraction also prevent cognitive decline. Almost certainly. I don't have a reference but I remember reading an article about a couple who were both neurologists. They were both in their 60s IIRC, and they each took on a new arbitrary hobby each year to exercise their brains. It could be anything, as long as it required a non-trivial amount of concentration and mental effort. I'll see if I can dig the article up, it was really interesting.

simias 15y ago
As someone whose native language is not english and is actively learning russian, I do experience the same kind of feelings when having to deal with both natural and programing languages. When writing C, I don't feel like I'm "translating English into C" as somebody else said, rather I "think" in C: in pointers, in functions, in arrays, in structs... Likewise right now I'm not translating my native language into English, I just think and write in English. I also experiment the same kind of frustration when I have to write something in a language I don't know well (be it Python or Russian). I don't know the vocabulary, I have to look up everything on the web all the time to find out what's the right way to express something. Some parts of the grammar seem backwards and you try to say things in one language the way you would say them in an other, and it ends up in a complete mess (and often, you blame the language, see that "C is better than C++" thread that was on the frontpage earlier). That being said, it's pretty obvious that learning a programming language (even something as big as C++) is orders of magnitude simpler than learning a foreign language, so I would not say that knowing Python and Prolog is nearly comparable (or as big an achievement) to knowing Japanese and Arabic. On the other hand, we use programing languages to solve complex problems that always require some mental effort when speaking a language becomes completely natural once you're sufficiently fluent, so I suppose both may be beneficial to the brain in the long term.

by lemming 15y ago

simias 15y ago

As someone whose native language is not english and is actively learning russian, I do experience the same kind of feelings when having to deal with both natural and programing languages. When writing C, I don't feel like I'm "translating English into C" as somebody else said, rather I "think" in C: in pointers, in functions, in arrays, in structs... Likewise right now I'm not translating my native language into English, I just think and write in English. I also experiment the same kind of frustration when I have to write something in a language I don't know well (be it Python or Russian). I don't know the vocabulary, I have to look up everything on the web all the time to find out what's the right way to express something. Some parts of the grammar seem backwards and you try to say things in one language the way you would say them in an other, and it ends up in a complete mess (and often, you blame the language, see that "C is better than C++" thread that was on the frontpage earlier). That being said, it's pretty obvious that learning a programming language (even something as big as C++) is orders of magnitude simpler than learning a foreign language, so I would not say that knowing Python and Prolog is nearly comparable (or as big an achievement) to knowing Japanese and Arabic. On the other hand, we use programing languages to solve complex problems that always require some mental effort when speaking a language becomes completely natural once you're sufficiently fluent, so I suppose both may be beneficial to the brain in the long term.