Brooders

The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis states there is a relationship between the language a person speaks and how they think. That’s my summary of it, wikipedia has a more thorough definition of Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis.

Interestingly, my exposure to this concept was through a presentation 10 Things Every Java Programmer Should Know About Ruby by Jim Weirich.

Jim quoted the following: A language that doesn’t affect the way you think about programming is not worth knowing — Alan Perlis.

In the world of programming, changing languages can mean changing the way you think. Peter Norvig, an AI researcher among other things wrote a paper Teach yourself programming in 10 years. One of his arguments, relates to a few days in another syntax is only going to get you writing programs that look like it, but thinking in whatever language you were using before.

E.g. A Basic programmer learning Java, after 10 days is going to be writing Basic programs using java syntax.

Norvig discusses that it takes time and experience to understand the nuances, strengths and weaknesses of a language. And these things aren’t really learnt from a book, only the basic syntax is. It comes back to the “learning by doing” argument.

Stepping away from programming languages, what does this mean for spoken and written languages ? Which is the original intent of Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis. As more and more people learn and speak english, does this mean we all think about things the same, or are we just translating from the first language into the second, possibly losing the intent of communication. When we notice some people speaking english that sound abrupt or direct (thinking native German or Russion as examples), this is probably due to the translation of their original language to english.

Norvigs discussion around learning a language takes time and that “you have to use it, to understand it” is true for both human and programming languages.