Hacker News Reader

Comment by josephpmay | Hacker News Reader

That's absolutely fascinating, because I personally always think the same "way." Are you aware of any research on this subject?

View on HN

I always think in the language I am currently speaking/listening to. And I'm pretty sure everyone else does.

As for programming languages, I myself haven't done functional programming, but I'd imagine if I did, I would temporarily discard any OO programming knowledge I have, while busy coding something in a functional way. Because OO concepts are mostly irrelevant in that case, so why would you be thinking about them?

Discarding OO concepts is easier said than done. I'm betting that inability to discard OO concepts is the main hurdle people have while learning FP.

The good ones generally map to (pardon the pun) equivalent functional concepts.

After working in F# for a while if I flip back to something else I'll spend twice as long getting anything done as I'll model my process in my head with tools I don't have access to. I just keep getting stuck, and having to force myself to think without maps and folds and so on.

Like any context switch it takes me time to get back into the right mindset and process meaningfully.

There's a lot of research that shows that polyglots exhibit different personalities when conversing in different languages. Empirically, I experience this.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity

"Linguistic relativity, also known as the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis or Whorfianism, is a concept-paradigm in linguistics and cognitive science that holds that the structure of a language affects its speakers' cognition or world view."

What OP is mentioning is only tangentially related to linguistic relativity - more precisely Sapir-Whorf was making very general statements (most of which have not been found to be empirically supported) about the affect of language on world view (e.g. including differences in color word).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com