Re: Cobol work?


In article <zqT4f.35459$Lp.18470@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, "Judson McClendon" <judmc@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:
> "Richard" <riplin@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> >
> > Legibility is entirely what one is used to. ...
>
> Not entirely! To a large degree, yes. Not all languages are equally
> assimilable by the human mind.

Aside from strawman degenerate cases, do you have any evidence that
in practice anyone has demonstrated a significant difference in the
relative comprehensibility of programming languages among seasoned
practitioners?

> And it has been proven that humans do better
> with letter based languages than with pictogram type languages,

Citation?

> which were
> abandoned by everybody but Asians long ago.

So by everyone except a large fraction of the world's population.
Hardly a compelling argument. (And many of the phonemic-symbol
languages were imposed by force on subject populations, not adopted
due to some natural superiority.)

> Some indication of this
> particular aptitude of the brain for lettered languages can be seen in that
> the following can be fairly easily read:
> [Snip the example from the Cambridge word-order study]

And how does this demonstrate that users of logographic languages
(which are not, incidentally, pictographic) cannot cope with
similar misorderings in their languages? Or that, if they cannot,
that this is due to some innate capability in the human brain, and
not, say, lower information entropy (and thus higher redundancy) in
written English as compared to other languages?

--
Michael Wojcik michael.wojcik@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx

The lark is exclusively a Soviet bird. The lark does not like the
other countries, and lets its harmonious song be heard only over the
fields made fertile by the collective labor of the citizens of the
happy land of the Soviets. -- D. Bleiman
.

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