this post was submitted on 15 Oct 2023
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Programming

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This is what happens to your brain when you read computer code (www.zdnet.com)
submitted 1 year ago by vidarh@lemmy.stad.social to c/programming@programming.dev
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cross-posted from: https://lemmy.stad.social/post/22011

"The areas of the MD network that were activated by reading code weren't the parts called on for maths, leaving an open question as to whether programming should be taught as a maths-based skill or a language-based skill."

They tested with Python, so this doesn't really surprise me. I suspect strongly my own experience that testing with Python both under-estimates the language involvement vs. more linguistically expressive languages but also significantly under-estimates the maths involvement relative to more formal languages, especially function and array languages. There's a marked separation between developers who see maths as essential to programming vs. those who see it as a language thing.

That they recruited from MIT, Tufts and immediate surroundings may well also affect their results.

Would be interesting to see a broader study.

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[–] Sigmatics@lemmy.ca 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

It's called a programming language for a reason

As a professional software engineer, the number of times I actually have to use math skills is pretty low

Even when I worked on a statistical application for lifetime prediction, most of the work wasn't figuring out the correct math

What's leagues more important here is conceptual thinking and being able to model complex human-made constructs in your head