Can aptitude for learning Programming paradigms be influenced by culture or native language's grammar? [closed]

Question

It is well known that different people have different aptitudes regarding various programming paradigms (e.g. some people have trouble learning non-procedural, especially functional languages. Some people have trouble understanding pointers - see Joel Spolsky's blog for musings on that. Some people have trouble grasping recursion).

I was recently reading about a study that looked at how the grammar of someone's native language affected their speed of learning math. Can't find that article now but a quick googling found this reference.

That led me to wondering whether someone's native culture or first language might affect their aptitude towards various programming paradigms. I'm more curious about positive influences - e.g. some trait that make it easier/faster for someone to learn a particular paradigm, for example native language grammar being very recursion-oriented.

To be clear, I'm looking for how culture/language grammare may affect the difference between aptitude of the same person towards various paradigms as opposed to how it affects overall aptitude towards programming between different persons.

Important: the only answers I'm interested in are either references to scientific studies, or personal observations from someone intimately familiar with a particular culture/language, including from their own experience.

E.g. I'm not interested in your opinion of how Chinese being your first language affects anything unless you speak Chinese or worked with extremely large set of Chinese-native programmers extensively.

I'm OK with your guesstimates not based on scientific studies, but please be sure to supply your reasoning about plausible causes of your observation.

I'm not interested in culture-bashing (any such commends will be deleted or flagged for deletion).

I'm also not particularly interested in culture-building - we all know Linus is from Finland and Tetris was written in Russia and Larry Wall is an American. Any culture/nation can produce a brilliant mind in any discipline. I'm interested in averages.

Answer 1

Disclaimer: I was a Cultural Anthropologist before I got into programming, so you know I'm going to be on a high horse, here.

Obviously, a person's history will have an impact on their aptitude for any particular task, but I think this has less to do with the structure or grammar of a person's language than it does with the particular material conditions of the culture in which that language is spoken.

For example, a pair of Anthropologists in the 60's went to various African communities and tested people's susceptibility to various optical illusions. Here is a classic one:

In this illusion, the bottom line looks longer, because the angled lines connecting it make it appear to be off in the distance.

These Anthropologists found that in many African cultures, the illusion doesn't work at all - people consider the lines to be the same length. By refining their study, they found that the only people who were susceptible to the illusion were people who had grown up in an urban environment. They hypothesized that the illusion did not work on people from remote jungle environments, because these people had little or no experience with right angles and seeing things at very long distances.

My point with this is that even if you successfully found a correlation between programmers' native languages and their abilities with certain aspects of programming, you couldn't be sure that the correlation wasn't spurious. For example, you might think that Asians tend to be bad drivers, and you might even be able to demonstrate this statistically. If you then concluded, however, that "bad driving" is some sort of fundamental characteristic of Asian-ness, you would be ignoring the fact that Asians are more likely to be from Asia, and thus to have had much less experience driving cars (or even being in cars) while growing up than Westerners (and especially Americans) have had.

With programming, we might think that a particular language inhibits programming ability, and not take note of the fact that the society in which that language is spoken has much less access to computers, and thus people growing up with that language appear to have less programming aptitude or ability to understand certain programming concepts.

In short, I wouldn't give much credence to the idea that language inhibits anyone's ability to understand anything in particular. The human mind is much too flexible and adaptable for that to be true.

Answer 2

This seems analogous to the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis - that the facilities of a language affect the ease which which one can cogitate about certain subjects, or in the words of the Wikipedia article:

"The linguistic relativity principle (also known as the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis) is the idea that the varying cultural concepts and categories inherent in different languages affect the cognitive classification of the experienced world in such a way that speakers of different languages think and behave differently because of it."

( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity )

While there appears to be little definitive information here, the discussions appear to be relevant to the question, and perhaps worthy of further exploration.

Answer 3

Just a few random thoughts. I think the influence is generally very weak and can most of the time be neglected but they do exist and sometimes they can make us feel them.

In Chinese grammar, for example, we don't quite distinguish between plural and singular forms, but I wouldn't think we Chinese have any noticeable difficulty understanding the concepts of scalar and array in Perl. The reason might be this: although we generally don't need particular suffixes or changes in form to indicate whether something is singular or plural, we do have the concepts of plural and singular and we mostly depend upon the context to tell them apart. Grammar-wise, the context in Chinese may possibly be way more important than that in those languages belonging to indo-european family. We omit a lot of things sometimes when they have already been mentioned and sometimes when we just presume that these things can be implicitly well understood by the listener. In either case, we don't need those indefinite and definite articles (a, an, the) or those relative pronouns like, that, which and who, to indicate whether they're being mentioned for the first time or yet another time again. Maybe that's partially why I feel very comfortable with Perl's default variable "$". print; chomp; split; all act upon $, which has never ever been mentioned. But this is quite subjective.

I think the Chinese language is more characterized by implicitness and fuzziness than Indo-european languages. For example, We never ever pay attention to subject verb agreement and we never ever do verbal conjugation to denote tenses. This could mean that the Chinese are inclined use a not quite so logical mode of thinking. One of my teachers onced used an example to try to generalize (or maybe over-generalize)the difference between Chinese non-logical mode of thinking and American logical mode of thinking.

If the American version of quarrelling should be this:

“I can lick you.” “No, you can’t.” “Yes, I can.” “No, you can’t.” “I can.” “you can’t.” “Can!” “Can’t!”

The Chinese version (translated in English) would be something like this:

I can lick you. How dare you! What if I dare? Then you try. Try? Hm, you wait and see. Wait and see? I’m not afraid. Not afraid? OK. You don’t run away. Who runs away? Come on and lick

Well, I agree that there may be some differences between Chinese way of thinking and that of other countries but the example looks like a stereotype because the Chinese may easily switch to the use of the American version. Back to the question, I think the language and culture may indeed influence a programmer's learning process in one way or another but this influence is defninitely not decidingly noticeable. Maybe because of the culture you're exposed to makes you feel a little bit uncomfortable to get used to some notions in some programming language, recursion or whatever, but time will solve it.