On Sun, 8 Oct 2000, Jason Cunliffe wrote:
I find myself become more of an instant nutcase than testcase when I look at even this trivial example:
(define (area-of-disk r) (* 3.14 (* r r)))
A voice inside my head starts saying "No. Stop no!"
I wonder to how many people react differently from me, and what the real pre-conditions are whereby one says instead "oh yes of course! :-)"
Do you know about modalities? Kinesthetic/Visual/Auditory and all that? I'd venture that you tend to rely on Auditory-Internal-Digital thinking a lot.. in other words, you think to yourself in words.. (As you demonstrate above.. "voice", "one says", plus you read a lot, etc..) LISPish syntax doesn't really lend itself well to thinking in words. At least not english ones.. Python does. That's why it's "executable psuedocode" :) Now, if you'd grown up speaking lojban ( http://www.lojban.org/ ) you might find programming in scheme much more natural.. LISP/scheme work better thinking visually, at least for me.. But then I'm not a lisp or scheme programmer.. :)
Are there consistent universal patterns of recognition and action which are independent from language culture personality? How does learning play into this.. Where does early computer programming belong?
No clue, but I've got a book on my to-read list that deals with a lot of this.. "The Language Instinct" by Steven Pinker.. Cheers, - Michal ------------------------------------------------------------------------ www.manifestation.com www.sabren.com www.linkwatcher.com www.zike.net ------------------------------------------------------------------------