The language brain matters more for learning programming than the math brain

Re:The language brain matters more for learning programming ... by throwaway2037 on Friday May 02, 2025 @03:58PM (#43874019)

    > Its very rare imo that computational problems emerge fully formed & ready to be tackled like proofs.

In my generation, the perfect example is Python's Timsort. It is an modest improvement upon prior sorting algorithms, but it has come to dominate. And, frankly, in terms of computer science history, it was discovered very late. The paper was written in 1993, but the first major, high-impact open source implementation was not written until 2003. Ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timsort

It has been reimplemented in a wide variety of languages today. I look forward to the next iteration: WolfgangSort or FatimaSort or XiaomiSort or whatever.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:The language brain matters more for learning programming ... by jauntywundrkind on Saturday May 03, 2025 @02:33AM (#43877257)

The a capital example of an exception that prove the rule.

I absolutely value & have huge respect for the deeply computational works that advance us all along!

But this is an exceedingly rare event. Most development is more glue work than advancing computional fundamentals. Very very very little of the industry is paid to work on honing data structures so generally.

[ Parent | on HN ]