Very interesting. I just noticed this comment, and I think the guy stumbled into something about why FP is popular in a certain population:
"The language requirement is because Native American languages are verb based. Hopi has no nouns at all. I argue that nouns are good for sorting objects into categories and associating responses with the categories. Verbs are better for describing processes and relationships. People using verb based languages are very likely to be a population that assumes juxtapositional thinking is available to them."
Update: The short version of the article is that your brain has two modes of thinking. The one programmers use he calls "Juxtapositional", and cannot be accessed when the chemicals associated with stress are present. He then draws the relationship in the above quote, where Native American cultures were less stressed, and used verb based languages.
Notice that many of the "weird" programming languages are verb based / functional? lisp, haskell, forth, etc. Maybe some of the power of these languages is related to the fact that only people who aren't stressed like using them?
That one sentence makes me doubt the entire essay. No language can get along without nouns. The Wikipedia page on the Hopi language has examples of nouns.
Can you imagine any normal person being able to live their life without representing physical objects? That isn't just a functional language; that would be like a programming language without variables or data structures.
There's a trope in North American culture of supposing that Native Americans were or are somehow holier than other kinds of people, or even had access to some special states of consciousness. Their cultures are nearly destroyed so it's hard to check that. But I think it's silly and probably kind of patronizing.
There is some work which does suggest that a Neolithic tribe can have very different concepts of time and number, but this is still a point of controversy. I don't believe we're going to find the key to enlightenment here, just a different way of thinking, which is way more important than a fantasy for nirvana via linguistics, IMO.
Although, I will forgive this author because it's not central to his argument, and he has a point about how Native American lifestyle was the antithesis of modernity.
> that would be like a programming language without variables or data structures.
I would say it's more like a language where every "noun" is really a "verb" in disguise—e.g. combinatoric logic. You can let K and KI mean true and false when speaking about combinatoric logic, but when using it, they're still verbs (combinators), not values.
"The language requirement is because Native American languages are verb based. Hopi has no nouns at all. I argue that nouns are good for sorting objects into categories and associating responses with the categories. Verbs are better for describing processes and relationships. People using verb based languages are very likely to be a population that assumes juxtapositional thinking is available to them."
Update: The short version of the article is that your brain has two modes of thinking. The one programmers use he calls "Juxtapositional", and cannot be accessed when the chemicals associated with stress are present. He then draws the relationship in the above quote, where Native American cultures were less stressed, and used verb based languages.
Notice that many of the "weird" programming languages are verb based / functional? lisp, haskell, forth, etc. Maybe some of the power of these languages is related to the fact that only people who aren't stressed like using them?