The programming talent myth
The programming talent myth
Posted May 20, 2015 10:55 UTC (Wed) by nix (subscriber, #2304)In reply to: The programming talent myth by neilbrown
Parent article: The programming talent myth
The thing that particularly stands out for me (and which I think I can make relevant) is that you present a highly reductionistic view. You focus on the details and deny (some aspects of) the big picture (there is no beauty in the Mona Lisa, only brush strokes).There's plenty of beauty in the Mona Lisa, but we're such a long way from understanding the neural correlates of 'beauty' that it's hard to talk about in an objective sense.
One of the (I claim) particular abilities of the human brain is to work at different levels of abstraction.Definitely, and this also appears to be a specifically human faculty: "integrative intelligence", if you will. (Some corvids and parrots might have something like it too. No other great ape seems to. I don't know about cetaceans.)
I think that a key part of competence with software (that's where we started, isn't it?) is the ability to move up and down the abstraction levels comfortable.Of course, a lot of programmers can't do it. Does that mean they're not human, or just not conscious entities? (Thinking of some I have known in the past, I'd believe the 'not conscious entities' part in an instant :P ). Probably neither, which likely means that in most humans this ability is something used in childhood and then discarded when large-scale learning stops.
By evoking the need for deep conceptual hierarchies, the automatic computer confronts us with a radically new intellectual challenge that has no precedent in our history.Mathematics was doing that long before, but of course software development is a mass phenomenon in a way that mathematics never was. There are many millions of software developers now, most fairly new to the field: there have never been anywhere near that many mathematicians.