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A succinct and level-headed assessment of the programming language landscape. Agree that beginners need to struggle with unwieldy personal projects before " get

A succinct and level-headed assessment of the programming language landscape. Agree that beginners need to struggle with unwieldy personal projects before " getting" typing and classes. "The idea is that you can't understand a solution without understanding the problem it solves," great quote! "But mostly, software is bounded by its creation process: Programmers have limited time to create, and especially limited time to maintain, code." Software is this weird commodity with no marginal cost but some "complexity" cost. Also, I remember taking a theory of the mind course and learned how people whose native language didn't have words for things like other people's minds or consciousness couldn't solve tests on those topics IIRC. Humans, in general, needed these words in our vocab to reason about these things. Just as adding words in our language helped us reason about higher-order concepts, these programming words and features allow us to reason about our code better. Furthermore, words in our language grow organically, just like these programming concepts.

thaumasiotes 5y ago
> Humans, in general, needed these words in our vocab to reason about these things. Just as adding words in our language helped us reason about higher-order concepts Except that words for concepts nobody's ever bothered to consider don't just appear in the language. That can only happen when somebody tries to think about the topic and is forced into making up some new words.
tsimionescu 5y ago
> Also, I remember taking a theory of the mind course and learned how people whose native language didn't have words for things like other people's minds or consciousness couldn't solve tests on those topics IIRC. Given that most animals can reason about other animals as agents with intentions, I'm not sure what people have been unable to answer. This also sounds a bit longer the discredited setting version of the Sappir-Whorf hypothesis (linguistic determinism).

thaumasiotes 5y ago

> Humans, in general, needed these words in our vocab to reason about these things. Just as adding words in our language helped us reason about higher-order concepts Except that words for concepts nobody's ever bothered to consider don't just appear in the language. That can only happen when somebody tries to think about the topic and is forced into making up some new words.

tsimionescu 5y ago

> Also, I remember taking a theory of the mind course and learned how people whose native language didn't have words for things like other people's minds or consciousness couldn't solve tests on those topics IIRC. Given that most animals can reason about other animals as agents with intentions, I'm not sure what people have been unable to answer. This also sounds a bit longer the discredited setting version of the Sappir-Whorf hypothesis (linguistic determinism).