Comment by troad
14 days ago
> And in the first hour of their first class they were already doing symbolic differentiation in scheme.
People heavily trained in maths can take quickly to languages designed to make programming look like maths, that's hardly a surprise.
I wouldn't base my assumptions about what most people find natural on the experience of MIT students taking 6.001 in 1980.
(Not to mention, 'doing' is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence. I could show you a intricate sentence in French in the first hour of your first French class, but unless you came up with it yourself, are you demonstrating much learning just yet?)
But you are basing your assumptions on absolutely nothing.
I'm basing my assumptions my own experience, both learning to code and teaching others to code, which isn't nothing to me, but may well be nothing to you. (No shade intended, that's totally valid.)
I would certainly be interested in the results of a study that put a simpler interpreter / compiler and a language reference in front of motivated non-programmers, but I strongly suspect that the amount of elegant tail recursion we'll see will be limited (and I'd very much expect there to be a correlation between that and a training in mathematics).
Imho, data comes from experiments, but experiments come from hypotheses, and hypotheses come from experience.