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Comment by laughinghan

Wow, that's crazy.

Others here, and presumably your friends, have talked about how they think of programming "visually", but they don't think visually about conversing in natural language.

I thought of a concrete way to describe it: it "feels obvious" to me that any programming language could be "easily" replaced by a systematic diagramming method, with programs translated systematically into equivalent diagrams. If anything, a diagram would be clearer and more readable to me than the same program in plaintext. (Of course, it would be much more cumbersome to input such a diagram into a computer than plaintext.)

Whereas the idea of systematically translating arbitrary natural language sentences into diagrams is...nonsensical to me. I mean I wouldn't even know where to begin.

I'm curious if for you, do you feel like you could easily systematically translate a natural language sentence into a diagram? Or, because you don't think as visually as people like me, translating a program into a diagram is not "obvious" to you at all? Or maybe this distinction just doesn't feel significant to you, one language being diagram-translatable and another being diagram-untranslatable doesn't cause them to feel different, they feel equally language-y to you?

parent laughinghan 5 years ago

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