Hacker News Reader

Comment by xor99 | Hacker News Reader

Do you have proof of this like a large participant study or it is just intuition or your personal experience? I feel like lots of people who are good at maths are good at programming but they are not actually similar structurally.

To me it was always much more similar to some combination of learning a language and learning the linguistic rules of that language in great detail to the point where you have a metalinguistic understanding of it. Then, math would be an adjunct but very separate component that could be manipulated by the programming language.

View on HN

Languages are part of mathematics.

Please read this fascinating book: https://dickgrune.com/Books/PTAPG_1st_Edition/

Parsing, generating phrases, understanding (analysis), etc, are all studied in applied math.

Ah cool, that looks interesting!

My interest in the comment was whether learning programming is like learning for natural languages or mathematics. At least one study shows that both intuitions about learning programming turn out to be wrong lol:

https://boingboing.net/2020/12/30/study-finds-brain-activity...

Python is fairly distant from actual math.

Haskell, for one example, is much closer, the definitions in Haskell are very math-y: let this = that in what; f x = z where z = g x y. Even list comprehension in Haskell is much more like the actual math notation than what is implemented in Python.

I work with fairly large code base(s) with tons of legacy, as of late. In my case, I do the detective work - find alleged culprits, link them, present evidence, prove, etc.

I guess in next study one should do MRI for detectives and programmers working on legacy code base. ;)

> but they are not actually similar structurally.

The Curry-Howard isomorphism wants a word.

True, I guess as the other commenter has pointed out there is a huge difference between scripting languages and their seeming closeness to natural language compared to mathy languages like Haskell that have this isomorphism and are very structurally similar.

A less type-safe language would still be isomorphic to a mathematical proof, but it could contain a wider range of errors compared to a more type-safe language. The language could be either functional or imperative, and still be isomorphic to a proof.

A correct (error-free) computer program written in any language (even javascript) would be equivalent to a correct mathematical proof.

It's a bit mind-bogglingly profound, but that's the beauty of the Curry-Howard correspondence.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com