When Lisp was introduced to us in 2nd year undergrad CS, the professor promised it would be a relief to work with such an intuitive language, which was designed to be written like we think. After a month or so, most of us were wondering which planet does that "we" refer to. Personally, I loved Lisp for its mathematical beauty, but that's probably correlated to the fact that I the term "mathematical beauty" makes sense to me.
I think that if this discussion is to go beyond passion and poetics, we need to unpack the notion of "intuition" in some manner of rigour. Intuition exists: the spell checker recognises the word. But can it be quantified? Perhaps we could break it down to components. I would argue that personal experience, vernacular discourse and innate learning processes are some of the constituents of intuition. As for the last element, I could offer narrative (in the sense of Bruner) as an innate mechanism of constructing and organising knowledge. Thus, I would conjecture, a language with narrative qualities would be more intuitive. ___________________________ Yishay Mor, Researcher, London Knowledge Lab http://www.lkl.ac.uk/people/mor.html http://www.google.com/calendar/embed?src=yishaym%40gmail.com +44-20-72789524 2009/11/23 Richard O'Keefe <[email protected]> > Does anyone know whether there's any empirical evidence either way > for the hypothesis > programmers find a programming language or paradigm > "intuitive" to the degree that it resembles what they > learned first > ? > > Another mailing list I'm on just had a bunch of people shouting > that imperative programming was obviously more intuitive than > functional or logic programming. Since they didn't seem to be > familiar with the fairly wide gap between a typical first-year > model of how an imperative language and what _really_ happens > (e.g., apparently non-interfering loads and stores can be > reordered both by the compiler and the hardware, loads from main > memory can be 100 times slower than loads from L1 cache, &c), > I found myself wondering if what they _really_ meant is "I learned > a simple model early on and find anything else different." > > There's evidence that people find languages like Scheme and Erlang > (and even Prolog) easier if they haven't done conventional > imperative or OO programming before, but that's not to say that > they wouldn't have found those approaches easier still. > > >
