1. Associative vs Analytical
The brain has two parts. An analytical one and an associotive part.
The analytical part consists of two rooms.
Server and Teacher room.
The server room chooses a goal, find the means, and executes it. The teacher
room tries to eliminate facts by rules. It makes up theories. It is
order-sensitive.
On the other part of the brain, the most interesting is the perciever-room.
For a perciever every abstract thing has a meaning in relation to something
else. He sees the big picture and then tries to fill in the blanks. He also
always sees what is out of order. He thinks parralell.
A teachter does it the other way around, he begin with the basics and
expands his picture the more knowledge he gains. He comes up with a theory,
a rule and combines it with the scope it applies on. He is sensitive for
order. After hearing fact a and b, but not c, he might have a theory
applying on only a and b, not c.
Now I was comparing programming languages with these two ways of thinking,
and I noticed, that the teacher way of thinking is what most programming
languages expect. Small basic routines, bigger routines, and slowly towards
the bigger picture. A perfect match for functional programming languages.
A perceiver-alike can be found in OO. But its a bad match. It doesnt work
like a perceiver-room at all, but at least its associative.
The funny thing is, too think, make up abstract things you need both these
two rooms. The teacher sees the rule, the perceiver sees what's wrong with
the rule. Its the normal procces that we call 'analyzing' .. the movement
from bottom-up view of a subject to a top-down-view on a subject and back.
Maybe its time, we wrote a programming langauge that will work with both
these two thinking patterns.
You can read more about all 7 rooms of the brain at:
http://www.freshy.com/theory/index0.htm
PS. Perceiver is the room used for any type of thinking in context. Its
essential for grammer for example. Context-sensit programming was discussed
on here before, so maybe this is the answer.
Ralf Nieuwenhuijsen
nieuwen at xs4all.nl
