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Currently Reading: The Marriage Plot, by Jeffrey Eugenides
A short discussion on programming languages broke out this afternoon at the TPSS math club meeting among a handful of club members sitting near me at the long table. I was reminded of how a comment posted to an online forum echoed the musings of the character Leonard Bankhead in The Marriage Plot.
The forum post claimed that a novice learning a new programming language can advance rapidly by studying deeply the native types/data structures that the language makes easy to define and address. The writing of the algorithm then flows naturally by expressing the desired real-world problem using those native types.
In the novel, Brown alumnus Leonard Bankhead, under psychiatric care for manic-depression, starts experimenting with his drug dosages while stationed at Pilgrim Lake on a biology research fellowship. He sends himself into full-blown mania, which culminates in a wild weekend of casino gambling, but not until making the astute observation that people's speech tends to follow predictable patterns: given the subject of a sentence, Leonard can often infer the predicate.
Perhaps these phenomena are all instances of a general fact about epistemology?
These phenomena seem to suggest that the noun is the most fundamental part of speech, upon which our entire edifice of knowledge can be constructed. By giving us the ability to point at some referent in the world, the noun endows us with more power than we usually appreciate. The one grammatical sin that I am most reluctant to leave uncorrected in my students' writing is the unclear use of labels for the quantities they calculate, as if the subject of the sentence is something that the reader can be assumed to know. In these first few years of teaching, rare indeed has been the class where I never find myself writing "antecedent unclear" on student papers, for the sin of using pronouns before a subject has been established.