On Tue, Apr 3, 2012 at 11:01 AM, Ian Kelly <ian.g.ke...@gmail.com> wrote: > On Tue, Apr 3, 2012 at 6:39 AM, Nathan Rice > <nathan.alexander.r...@gmail.com> wrote: >> Did you miss the part where I said that most people who learn to >> program are fascinated by computers and highly motivated to do so? >> I've never met a BROgrammer, those people go into sales. It isn't >> because there aren't smart BROmosapiens (sadly, there are), they just >> couldn't give two shits about computers so programming seems like a >> colossal waste of time to them. > > I have never met the brogrammer stereotype. I have also never met the > non-brogrammer stereotype of nerdy solitude (well, maybe once). > That's all these things are -- stereotypes. Real programmers are much > more complex.
I have never met a programmer that was not completely into computers. That leaves a lot unspecified though. >> Computers require you to state the exact words you're searching for as >> well. Try looking again, and this time allow for sub-categories and >> synonyms, along with some variation in word order. > > Lazy troll. You made the claim. The onus is on you to provide the evidence. I reserve the right to be lazy :) As part of my troll-outreach effort, I will indulge here. I was specifically thinking about some earlier claims that programming languages as they currently exist are somehow inherently superior to a formalized natural language in expressive power. I think part of this comes from the misconception that terse is better (e.g. Paul Graham's thoughts on car/cdr), which doesn't take into account that your brain compresses frequently occurring English words VERY efficiently, so they actually take up less cognitive bandwidth than a much shorter non-word. This behavior extends to the phrase level as well; longer phrases that are meaningful in their own right take up less bandwidth than short nonsensical word combinations. On the semantic side, most people already understand branched processes and procedures with conditional actions pretty well. People "program" other people to perform tasks constantly, and have been doing so for the entirety of our existence. The problem occurs when programming language specific semantic artifacts must be considered. These artifacts are for the most part somewhat arbitrary, or you would see them frequently in other areas, and they wouldn't confuse people so much. I think the majority of these relate to how the computer operates internally - this is the stuff that really turns most people off to programming. The crux of my view is that programming languages exist in part because computers in general are not smart enough to converse with humans on their own level, so we have to talk to them like autistic 5 year-olds. That was fine when we didn't have any other options, but all the pieces exist now to let computers talk to us very close to our own level, and represent information at the same way we do. Projects like IBM's Watson, Siri, Wolfram Alpha and Cyc demonstrate pretty clearly to me that we are capable of taking the next step, and the resurgence of the technology sector along with the shortage of qualified developers indicates to me that we need to move now. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
