Re: Confessions of an "OO Foreigner"

From: Howard Brazee (howard_at_brazee.net)
Date: 12/30/03 

Date: Tue, 30 Dec 2003 17:25:27 GMT

On 30-Dec-2003, "Judson McClendon" <judmc@sunvaley0.com> wrote:

> 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.

I am a native speaker of CoBOL and ADS/O. I can leave these languages for a
decade and pick them up naturally without study. Other programming languages
have to be re-learned to work them effectively. (The more familiar languages
take less time to re-learn than the less familiar languages).

> 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. :-)

I've heard of people like you. I don't understand the process going in your
head. Visually you say? When you write a paper in English, do you see a
visual structure of your plot?

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