Comment by j-g-faustus | Hacker News Reader

Comment by j-g-faustus | Hacker News Reader

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Some people find programming easy.

I was well into my twenties when I started programming, but I found the logic very natural - if this do that, otherwise do something else.

A friend of mine was skilled in natural languages (she spoke several languages reasonably well) and wanted to learn programming (it's just another form of language, right?), but she gave up after a semester - she found programming languages to be hopelessly nitpicky with nonsense rules and no relation whatsoever to languages used to communicate between humans.

For some segment of the population the basic premises of programming come easy, and it's just a matter of spending time enough to learn the details.

Others struggle mightily with the same basic premises, it seems like they can't really switch to the "extremely narrow minded one step at a time and you can't substitute uppercase letter O for numeric zero even though the look the same" frame of mind that is a prerequisite for doing any kind of programming in any language.

It's possible that programming is learnable by everyone, but it certainly seems to come more natural to a few.

I suspect that the difference is more deep seated than we normally give it credit for, possibly even somewhat analogous to the mix of "fast twitch" and "slow twitch" muscle fibre (http://sportsmedicine.about.com/od/anatomyandphysiology/a/Mu... ) that can give someone a natural advantage in certain kinds of sports.

... she found programming languages to be hopelessly nitpicky with nonsense rules and no relation whatsoever to languages used to communicate between humans.

I find that funny. Has she tried learning Russian?

As far as being "just another form of language;" I think the assumption is quite reasonable. However, like any significantly complex language it's easy to learn enough to get around and order dinner. But to be conversant enough to explain to someone how to perform a complex task in that langauge is quite another. I read somewhere once that people generally only have a certain amount of space in their brains in which to assimilate a language to such an extent.

A Russian won't throw an error (or anything else) at you if you conjugate a verb slightly wrong in a sentence where the meaning is otherwise clear, but a programming language will error out if you accidentally type two periods instead of one. Even the pickiest of human languages will generally be heard by listeners far more forgiving than a compiler.

You still need to be a sufficiently proficient speaker of Russian to get to a point where a slight mistake of inflection is so easily forgiven.

Similarily, once you are well versed in a programming language the compiler really stops bugging you about trivial errors in syntax and grammar.

However, it still won't forgive you if you make them. Just as I won't forgive people when they make glaring mistakes in their use of English. Yes I can still understand them, but I have the advantage over a computer -- there are probably half a dozen non-verbal cues that I can use to decipher your intended meaning (and is probably why online discussions are so prone to turning into flame wars).

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