Search Results

Search found 5 results on 1 pages for 'sapir whorf'.

Page 1/1 | 1 

• Can aptitude for learning Programming paradigms be influenced by culture or native language's gramma

  - by DVK

  It is well known that different people have different aptitudes regarding various programming paradigms (e.g. some people have trouble learning non-procedural, especially functional languages. Some people have trouble understanding pointers - see Joel Spolsky's blog for musings on that. Some people have trouble grasping recursion). I was recently reading about a study that looked at how the grammar of someone's native language affected their speed of learning math. Can't find that article now but a quick googling found this reference. That led me to wondering whether someone's native culture or first language might affect their aptitude towards various programming paradigms. I'm more curious about positive influences - e.g. some trait that make it easier/faster for someone to learn a particular paradigm, for example native language grammar being very recursion-oriented. To be clear, I'm looking for how culture/language grammare may affect the difference between aptitude of the same person towards various paradigms as opposed to how it affects overall aptitude towards programming between different persons. Important: the only answers I'm interested in are either references to scientific studies, or personal observations from someone intimately familiar with a particular culture/language, including from their own experience. E.g. I'm not interested in your opinion of how Chinese being your first language affects anything unless you speak Chinese or worked with extremely large set of Chinese-native programmers extensively. I'm OK with your guesstimates not based on scientific studies, but please be sure to supply your reasoning about plausible causes of your observation. I'm not interested in culture-bashing (any such commends will be deleted or flagged for deletion). I'm also not particularly interested in culture-building - we all know Linus is from Finland and Tetris was written in Russia and Larry Wall is an American. Any culture/nation can produce a brilliant mind in any discipline. I'm interested in averages.

  Read the article

• Learn Behavior-Driven Development

  - by Ben Griswold

  In this presentation, I provided a brief introduction into TDD and talked about the confusion and misconceptions around the discipline. I, of course, shared a bit about Dan North, the father of BDD and touched upon some crazy hypothesis dreamed up by Sapir and Whorf. I then gave a Behavior Driven Development overview (my impressions of the implementation and lifecycle) and then touched upon available tools, how to get started and I threw in a number of reference and reading materials which you will find below. As an added bonus, I demonstrated how easy it is to include/exclude hyphens and alter the spelling of “behavior” at will.   Introducing BDD, Dan North Oredev 2007 – Behaviour-Driven Development, Dan North Behavior-Driven Development, Scott Bellware Behavior Driven Development, Wikipedia BDD Wiki A New Look at Test-Driven Development, Dave Astels Behavior Driven Development – An Evolution in Testing, Bob Cotton The Truth about BDD, Uncle Bob Martin Language and Thought, Wikipedia Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, Wikipedia What’s in a Story?, Dan North

  Read the article

• How to disable automatic opening of PDF files in chrome

  - by Erik Sapir

  Chrome is opening the PDF files automatically and don't give option to save the file. How can i change this behavior?

  Read the article

• What am i doing wrong

  - by Erik Sapir

  I have the following code. I need B class to have a min priority queue of AToTime objects. AToTime have operator, and yet i receive error telling me than there is no operator matching the operands... #include <queue> #include <functional> using namespace std; class B{ //public functions public: B(); virtual ~B(); //private members private: log4cxx::LoggerPtr m_logger; class AToTime { //public functions public: AToTime(const ACE_Time_Value& time, const APtr a) : m_time(time), m_a(a){} bool operator >(const AToTime& other) { return m_time > other.m_time; } //public members - no point using any private members here public: ACE_Time_Value m_time; APtr m_a; }; priority_queue<AToTime, vector<AToTime>, greater<AToTime> > m_myMinHeap; };

  Read the article

• Learn Many Languages

  - by Jeff Foster

  My previous blog, Deliberate Practice, discussed the need for developers to “sharpen their pencil” continually, by setting aside time to learn how to tackle problems in different ways. However, the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, a contested and somewhat-controversial concept from language theory, seems to hold reasonably true when applied to programming languages. It states that: “The structure of a language affects the ways in which its speakers conceptualize their world.” If you’re constrained by a single programming language, the one that dominates your day job, then you only have the tools of that language at your disposal to think about and solve a problem. For example, if you’ve only ever worked with Java, you would never think of passing a function to a method. A good developer needs to learn many languages. You may never deploy them in production, you may never ship code with them, but by learning a new language, you’ll have new ideas that will transfer to your current “day-job” language. With the abundant choices in programming languages, how does one choose which to learn? Alan Perlis sums it up best. “A language that doesn‘t affect the way you think about programming is not worth knowing“ With that in mind, here’s a selection of languages that I think are worth learning and that have certainly changed the way I think about tackling programming problems. Clojure Clojure is a Lisp-based language running on the Java Virtual Machine. The unique property of Lisp is homoiconicity, which means that a Lisp program is a Lisp data structure, and vice-versa. Since we can treat Lisp programs as Lisp data structures, we can write our code generation in the same style as our code. This gives Lisp a uniquely powerful macro system, and makes it ideal for implementing domain specific languages. Clojure also makes software transactional memory a first-class citizen, giving us a new approach to concurrency and dealing with the problems of shared state. Haskell Haskell is a strongly typed, functional programming language. Haskell’s type system is far richer than C# or Java, and allows us to push more of our application logic to compile-time safety. If it compiles, it usually works! Haskell is also a lazy language – we can work with infinite data structures. For example, in a board game we can generate the complete game tree, even if there are billions of possibilities, because the values are computed only as they are needed. Erlang Erlang is a functional language with a strong emphasis on reliability. Erlang’s approach to concurrency uses message passing instead of shared variables, with strong support from both the language itself and the virtual machine. Processes are extremely lightweight, and garbage collection doesn’t require all processes to be paused at the same time, making it feasible for a single program to use millions of processes at once, all without the mental overhead of managing shared state. The Benefits of Multilingualism By studying new languages, even if you won’t ever get the chance to use them in production, you will find yourself open to new ideas and ways of coding in your main language. For example, studying Haskell has taught me that you can do so much more with types and has changed my programming style in C#. A type represents some state a program should have, and a type should not be able to represent an invalid state. I often find myself refactoring methods like this… void SomeMethod(bool doThis, bool doThat) { if (!(doThis ^ doThat)) throw new ArgumentException(“At least one arg should be true”); if (doThis) DoThis(); if (doThat) DoThat(); } …into a type-based solution, like this: enum Action { DoThis, DoThat, Both }; void SomeMethod(Action action) { if (action == Action.DoThis || action == Action.Both) DoThis(); if (action == Action.DoThat || action == Action.Both) DoThat(); } At this point, I’ve removed the runtime exception in favor of a compile-time check. This is a trivial example, but is just one of many ideas that I’ve taken from one language and implemented in another.

  Read the article

1