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I'm more surprised that anyone with any experience in programming languages has actually thought this could be the case. Making programming languages superficia

by xg15 2y ago

I'm more surprised that anyone with any experience in programming languages has actually thought this could be the case. Making programming languages superficially more like human languages is one of the classic rookie mistakes of programming language design. (See Perl's "do what I mean" paradigm and the chaos that resulted from it) I think two important differences right there are that programming languages are more like "constructing" some sort of entity - a formula, an algorithm, a data structure, an architecture of different components, etc" than it is about communication. Consequently, a lot of "thought" when programming is about the implicit properties of that thing being constructed and less so about the syntactic specifics. You can do the same in human language, e.g. if you write a recipe, a legal text, a mathematical definition, rules for a board game or instructions for an LLM, but human language can also be used for many modes of communication that have completely different purposes. I think a comparison of brain activity between reading computer code and reading formalized human language - or between reading formalized and non-formalized human language would be more interesting.

itronitron 2y ago
>> Making programming languages superficially more like human languages is one of the classic rookie mistakes one of the least productive programmers I've worked with was obsessed with Groovy
Izkata 2y ago
I'm approaching 30 years of experience and I do read code like human language. The visualizations I'm using for data structures aren't really much different than visualizing a scene from a book.
Tor3 2y ago
Knowing and using a bunch of programming languages, and also knowing and using several human languages to various levels, I'm firmly in the camp which says that these are totally, utterly different things. Learning a programming language is just as learning any other particular skill (though it's better if you have a programmer's brain, or rather, interest), while learning a human language is.. just very different. And tremendously more difficult, and it doesn't help that it's mostly a semi-conscious business, in fact "studying" in the general sense gives very little return.

by xg15 2y ago

itronitron 2y ago

>> Making programming languages superficially more like human languages is one of the classic rookie mistakes one of the least productive programmers I've worked with was obsessed with Groovy

Izkata 2y ago

I'm approaching 30 years of experience and I do read code like human language. The visualizations I'm using for data structures aren't really much different than visualizing a scene from a book.

Tor3 2y ago

Knowing and using a bunch of programming languages, and also knowing and using several human languages to various levels, I'm firmly in the camp which says that these are totally, utterly different things. Learning a programming language is just as learning any other particular skill (though it's better if you have a programmer's brain, or rather, interest), while learning a human language is.. just very different. And tremendously more difficult, and it doesn't help that it's mostly a semi-conscious business, in fact "studying" in the general sense gives very little return.