[FRIAM] Abducktion

[Prof David West]

Long time ago, as part of my cognitive anthropology studies, i had a lot of data about relationships among natural languages and programming languages (e.g. Native Hindi speakers learned Prolog, Pascal and SQL much faster than native English speakers) and between/among programming languages (e.g. C programmers took much longer to learn Smalltalk than COBOL programmers — and relational database experts seldom gained even minimal proficiency in Smalltalk).

There is also a lot of data that correlates problem solving / design conceptualization with 'expressiveness' of a programming language — e.g. C programmers *_cannot_* write business application programs; too much translation between domain concepts and C grammatical constructs. Functional programmers are equally inept.

The biggest single reason that OO never worked, is that programming profeciency/expertise in Java and C++ preclude your ability to think and design in objects.

davew


On Fri, Aug 7, 2020, at 9:00 AM, Barry MacKichan wrote:
> Very much so. We hired a grad student a long time ago (he stayed with us until he retired). He wrote great Pascal programs. He wrote great Pascal programs in C++, and in JavaScript. The effect of your first programming language on style, idioms, and your feelings about recursion and encapsulation.

> —Barry

> On 6 Aug 2020, at 23:24, thompnickson2 at gmail.com wrote:


>> Nah.  He means more than that.  Even ordinary languages predispose users to one kind of discourse or another.  I assume that programming languages do the same. 
>> 
>>  
>> 
>> N

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