[techtalk] This talk of N-ary trees and other things...

[Makiko Itoh]

Michelle, jenn, Nancy,

>One time someone told me to study Logic...but not just any logic, some
>specific type of logic.  I can no longer remember what it's called.  Maybe
>you know. I can see how it would help me to cover all my bases when
>writing programs.  It involves mapping out truth tables for problems like:

I don't have a CS degree, but I did take a whole bunch of CS courses 
in college. Years later it's amazing how much of that is still 
helpful, especially when learning new languages. It also helps to get 
the most out of any given language. (fwiw I took Pascal, C,C++ and 
Assembler formally, plus dBase in an intensive seminar thingie. which 
really dates me. :))

The logic course that we had back then was called Discrete 
Structures. Basically we learned  a lot of things about topics like 
booleans and probabilities and the like. Part of it was just like 
solving puzzles (and I've always liked those logic puzzles in the 
puzzle books). I'm not even sure what books would cover these types 
of topics, but it really helps when you are figuring out things.

Taking a formal programming course in any language, especially an 
object oriented one, can help immensely for all kinds of other 
programming tasks. It's like establishing a basic understanding of 
grammar, and programming language grammar doesn't differ nearly as 
much as human grammar does.

Speaking of which, I wonder if anyone has any thoughts on how 
learning human languages, or the ability to, translates to the 
ability to learn programming languages, or vice versa? Both my 
husband and I are multilingual and we often talk about how learning 
languages kind of helps us to get a "programmer head", if that makes 
sense.

Anyway, this is my first post here. I've enjoyed lurking so far. :)

cheers,
-- 
Makiko Itoh (Maki)
PRODOK Engineering, Switzerland: http://www.prodok.com
[building bridges for information]