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by platforms
2264 days ago
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According to Sapir-Whorf, what I think is affected by what the language I think in, that lets me express my own thoughts to myself. If there's no concept in English for an idea that occurs to me, it may remain muddled or I just might not become fully conscious of it. This is not the case for programming languages, because programming languages, even non-imperative ones, only have one mode: how to do something. They are not a way of describing the world. If I can't figure out the C++ code necessary to accomplish the task I want, that doesn't mean I can't imagine what that task is. Determining the task and figuring out how to code them are very different. |
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You probably won't be. I have observed a similar phenomenon when trying to imagine truly new things.
> If I can't figure out the C++ code necessary to accomplish the task I want, that doesn't mean I can't imagine what that task is.
If you can't figure it out in C++, but you could in (say) assembly (or Perl, or Python or whatever), then I would agree with that and would say I don't think that's an essential limitation of programming languages, and just that C++ is unfamiliar and byzantine.
But if you can't figure out the task in C++, but [believe] you could in [plain] English, I'd say you're just wrong: Whenever someone has told me "the ticket is perfectly clear" it most definitely was not. If your experiences are different, I'd like to hear about them.