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Comment by falcor84

15 days ago

That's a really deep question. Obviously there are types of creativity that don't require words, like painting or sculpting, or improvising music, but I'm having real difficulty imagining programming without something at least resembling natural language. The closest my imagination gets is Scratch/Blockly, but even then you're essentially creating an AST composed out of statements and expressions, even if they're pictorial.

Can you imagine the (intentional) creation of a program entirely without language?

Or, I suppose, if you're ok with it not being intentional, you can program via an evolutionary algorithm - is that what you have in mind?

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falcor84

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yencabulator  15 days ago

I think you're the kind of person who has an internal voice talking in their head, and can't imagine any other kind of thought?

Math is all about abstract shapes and properties, for me. So is much of programming.

  • toasterlovin  14 days ago

    Yeah, just chiming in to say the same. Essentially all of my thinking is geometric in nature. The only time I have any internal monologue is as a mnemonic device to remember a sequence.

  • falcor84  14 days ago

    Yeah, I suppose you're right and I'd love to understand more. Do you imagine a modality of programming a computer in an abstract (pictorial? diagrammatic?) way that fully bypasses the current need to form statements?

    • yencabulator  14 days ago

      Let's try this as an example.

          fn foo() -> Result<u32, MyError> { ... }

    let x = foo();
    match x {
        Ok(num) => println!("foo is {num}");
        Err(error) => eprintln!("no foo for you: {error:?}");
    }

      So I have in my head a thing that has the name "x" and a spatial connection to that area of the source code where foo is called.

      x is a Result<u32, MyError> and in my head that's a vague abstract shape with the "potential" to be either the uint32 shape (in my mind, a "brick" of a certain size) or a MyError shape (vague blob and since I know it's an enum it also has its own "potential" to be multiple shapes; it kind of has the branchiness of a tree without being tree-shaped; this is all abstract and concepts, not concrete shapes).

      When "x" meets the "match" the "x" shape splits into its "potential" shapes, and "num" has the uint32 brick shape.

      None of this has anything to do with visual programming like Scratch. It's just that I never say in my head words like "x has value of what foo returns" or "num is an uint32"; those just are.

      Does that make any sense to you?

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