[FRIAM] Abducktion

[Stephen Guerin]

On Thu, Aug 6, 2020 at 8:54 PM <thompnickson2 at gmail.com> wrote:

> Forgive me, but can you spell that out a bit?  How does working in a
> particular programming Language shape an approach to the problem.
>

As an example of FRIAM thread spelunking, here's a 2005 entry from the late
great Mike Agar on programming languages and the Whorfian Hypothesis - a
principle claiming that the structure of a language affects its speakers'
world view or cognition, and thus people's perceptions are relative to
their spoken language. (Wikipedia
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity>):


Ray's topic suggestions are good ones. Steve and I talked some about
another angle, applying the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis from ling anthro (that
language and habitual patterns of thought co-evolve) to "speakers" of
different computer languages and seeing how that plays out in project
teams.

I don't know this territory as well as I should, given my new life as a
planet in the FRIAM orbit, but from colleagues' stories way back when
I'm pretty sure the human/machine interface emphasis came out of the
pioneering use of ethnographers at Xerox PARC together with the infuence
of Latour's theories that technology must also be viewed as an actor in
a situation. John Seely Brown, the PARC-man who made this happen, tells
some of the stories in his book the Social Life of Information,
co-authored with Paul Duguid.

Mike

http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/ethnography-and-information-systems-td519925.html
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