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Comment by nurple | Hacker News Reader

Lex Fridman recently interviewed Edward Gibson, a linguist, and they talked a lot about how the brain processes language, including how someone reading code lights up a completely different part of the brain than language.

#426 https://lexfridman.com/podcast/

ETA: I believe Evelina Fedorenko, from this paper, is Edward's wife.

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I believe it. My worst grade in primary school was french and I'm having such a hard time learning Chinese compared to my peers (taking evening online classes in community college) but programming has always come naturally to me. Completely different skillsets as far as I'm concerned.

> Completely different skillsets as far as I'm concerned.

My experience differs:

I find the way how programming is typically (also self-)taught much more fitting to my brain than how natural languages are (also self-)taught.

From my experience I do believe that if natural languages were taught in a different style, it would be much easier for a programmer brain to get good in them (I also consider it to be plausible that there might exist a way on how to teach programming languages that is more natural to "language-minded brains").

My worst grade in school was German. Then, after graduating and when working my third programming job, I've started learning it again and I realized I'm actually really good at human languages (learning words and reading came naturally to me). It's just a school environment which stopped me.

[link]https://youtu.be/F3Jd9GI6XqE?t=4847 to relevant section

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