Ketil Malde wrote:
Although the question of how we "naturally" think often comes up, I'm not sure it's a very important one. In my experience, the natural thing for humans appear rather to be the absence of thinking, and instead slouching in front of the TV eating unhealthy food.
After all, we give people who program computers several years of education to learn about unnatural things like counters and temporary variables, or recursion and folds. The question shouldn't be what comes more natural for average Joe, but rather what skills can we teach a reasonably bright student in three to five years that will make her the most effective programmer.
I'll go along with that. Although, to all the people who ask "why is Ruby so popular?", I might suggest "because it's easy to learn"...