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Pastimes : NNBM - SI Branch -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: HG who wrote (23687)	2/23/2003 4:11:01 PM
From: lurqer	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 104183

did assembly, autocoder, cobol, oracle and informix.... Never programmed a 1401 so I never used autocoder. I assume oracle is some form of SQL. Surely assembly (several versions); COBOL was my introduction to data structuring. Most COBOL programs are IPOs (That's Input, Process and Output for non-programmers, not Initial Public Offerings). When I realized, that if you could find just the right data structure, such that if you looked at it one way it was the input, and another way it was the output, then there was no process. Problem solved just by the way you looked at things. That was clearly a more sophisticated way of programming than I was used to in FORTRAN or ALGOL. Although it led me to reappraise what could be done with a FORTRAN equivalence statement. This led to a preference to languages that had both subtle manipulative abilities, and powerful data structuring capabilities. It's not that you can't do almost anything in any language, rather it's that you'll never think of some things in some languages. There are some very subtle ways in which language controls thought. This goes for human languages as well, as anyone who has ever tried translating knows. Some ideas either can't be (or are very difficult to be) expressed in some other languages. I recall sitting in a car many years ago with a young couple from the Netherlands. Having learned several languages from an early age, when conversing with each other, they would automatically choose the language most appropriate for the topic. Moreover, upon occasion, they would choose a polyglot mixture, because no one language would suffice. Fascinating to listen to them. Given that language is so powerful, and given that language is one's first major learning experience, one's first "tongue" has a significant effect upon the way one's brain works. From my experience with computer languages, I had already realized this. Hence, it was with some amusement, that I read of the research of a Japanese gentleman trying to reproduce American research on the bicameral brain. He was totally unsuccessful. Unable to explain his results, he then tried his experiments on Americans of Japanese descent. Then his results jived. He concluded that the mother tongue had so profoundly affected the “wiring”, that which half of the brain was used for a particular task was altered. lurqer