This is my take, as a CS undergraduate. I'm not sure if we can say that a programmer's language of choice determines the way they think about programming (the strong version of linguistic relativity for programming, as I see it). But I think it's fairly obvious that the language we choose to use to solve a problem affects how we think about the solution. That's basically the entire raison d'être for domain-specific languages (DSLs)! DSLs are popular (and becoming more so) precisely because the right choice of DSL can make expressing the solution to a particular kind of problem almost trivial. A poor choice can almost doom an endeavor. Imagine trying to query a database in assembly language. No SQL. It would at the very least require some mental gymnastics that a SELECT statement simply obviates. Similarly, functional programmers tend to think about maps and folds, while imperative programmers tend to think about loops and iterators. While they accomplish much the same thing, it's amazing to read code and see what different directions they often lead. (Ömer, sorry for the double-response. I wish GMail defaulted to replying to the list. >_<) - Lucas On Fri, Jan 17, 2014 at 11:14 AM, Ömer Sinan Ağacan <omeragacan@gmail.com> wrote:
Hi all,
I recently got myself thinking about programming languages and their effects on programmers. I already knew that concept of "linguistic relativity" ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity ) and I was thinking that this may be relevant with programming too, although I don't have any concrete evidence. I was wondering if anyone else also find that idea of programming language's effect of the programmer interesting. Do we have any research on that kinds of things?
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