Re: Confessions of an "OO Foreigner"

From: Judson McClendon (judmc_at_sunvaley0.com)
Date: 12/30/03 

Date: Tue, 30 Dec 2003 16:11:30 GMT

"William M. Klein" <wmklein@nospam.netcom.com> wrote:
>
> I have an academic background in linguistics, and as such, I really, REALLY
> understand the difference between "knowing" a ("natural") language well enough
> to translate (to or from) and actually THINKING in that language. As long as
> you still "translate" in your mind, then you simply do NOT know the other
> language. As far as programming languages go, I am truly mono-lingual. The
> *only* programming language that I "think in" is COBOL - although I have
> "studied" a number of other languages (including IBM S/3xx Assembler, PL/I, C -
> IBM 4GLs Telon, ADF, CSP).

I realized when I read that paragraph and thought about it for a minute,
that I only 'think' in COBOL when I get down to the coding level. Maybe
because, from the beginning, my computer language experience has been
diverse (took classes and wrote production code in two different assembly
languages and COBOL, on three different computer systems, during the
first year) but when I am 'thinking logic' I think in a 'pseudo' language that
is somewhat like structured elements, and not in a specific language, until
I get to the actual coding. At the system design stage, I am not thinking in
a language at all, but in something like a four dimensional (3 + time)
schematic I couldn't describe very well.

This reminds me of a thread we had a few years ago about how we
programmers do our thing, either visually or in some other way. I am a
very visual person in general, and programming, for me, is very visual. I
view code mentally as at might look in an IDE debugger window, either
in my personal pseudo code, or the specific language I'm using. In fact, I
was stunned when a highly competent programmer friend said he didn't
program visually at all. Even after he explained it to me, I couldn't quite
understand the process going on in his head. That prompted the thread. :-) 

-- 
Judson McClendon      judmc@sunvaley0.com (remove zero)
Sun Valley Systems     http://sunvaley.com
"For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that
whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life."

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