[the_other]

> Most people intuitively describe images from foreground to background or left to right

I've heard there are cultural biases to this ordering. Some cultures tend to describe the background or scene first. The example I read about identified Japan as an "outside in".

I've been encouraging my kid to use "outside in" or "context first" in their descriptions with me, mainly because they suck at giving context. I doubt I'd have known about it if I hadn't read that about Japan.

Would love to hear from a Japanese person on this.

[LorenPechtel]

I can't speak from a Japanese perspective, but there's definitely a specific-to-general or general-to-specific nature to languages.

"If you can get it in the next 60 seconds there's a million dollars in the jar in the back right of the second shelf of refrigerator." My wife is Chinese, she works from a general-to-specific worldview and I would be surprised if she could follow those directions in the time limit.

Flip it and say "If you can get to it in the next 60 seconds there's a million dollars in the refrigerator, on the second shelf, in the back right, in a jar." and she would have no problem with it.

We focus on the specific, build up the image of it's environment and then paste it into the world. She refines the world so all the references are left hanging until the whole sentence is complete and that's probably enough to confuse her. We just find her approach to feel odd but we can still follow it much better than she can follow ours.

[chmod775]

There's a reason pretty the majority of electronic addressing uses that second format***. It's just easier to follow, and in fact you can start executing before the sentence is finished - as well as discard any specifics you don't care about without having to scan the entirety first.

Following the second instructions works like this: Go to refrigerator, go to second shelf, go to back right, go to jar.

Meanwhile following the first set of instructions requires this: remember jar, remember back right, remember second shelf, go to refrigerator, recall second shelf, recall back right, recall jar.

It is objectively a worse way to give instructions, because you are giving them in reverse order.

If you had to code some software following instructions and your interface was push(instruction)/end(), your first sentence would require more code and more working memory just to store instructions until you've given the last one, while for your second example they could just be executed right away.

*** Funnily enough it still tends to get flipped the closer we get to natural language. URL paths, domains, IP-addresses, etc, are all written the proper way, except if you add usernames into the mix. Suddenly we turn natural language "at" into "@" and prepend them.

[LorenPechtel]

For most purposes the second format is superior for the very reasons you state. In a certain world it's always going to be superior.

However, it means that concepts which are not attached to a worldview become harder to work with. Think of making subassemblies of jigsaw puzzle pieces. You can see that pieces are related and fit together without knowing what you're actually looking at.