An obvious way to gauge Mental Age or grasping power.

[gps]

LISP is sort of it's own thing with it's homoiconicity (get into it now while you're young enough for it to take root better--you might like it,

Your recommendation might not be lost on Serac as he commented on possibly learning lisp over in the Coding Thread.
https://intpforum.com/showthread.php?t=26889

Though in his case, as an R programmer, you might help break down resistance to experimentation more by reminding him that R is based on S and the Scheme dialect of Lisp.

it's all foreach loops for everything) ...

*heavy sigh*
Here we go again.
Got the hammer and tongs ready?

It's your language-based bias induced by the (mis)use of languages employing ITERATION which finds you (mis)representing and mis-characterizing the lisps in this way;
One can do much in the lisps via RECURSION which allows one to `recur' rather than reITERATE.
Of course one can iterate on both lists and vectors as well as exploit recursion on the -- singly linked -- lists available via the lisps.

there are languages like Brainfuck which is about as minimalist as you can get.
Take a look: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brainfuck

And nowadays one can evaluate/run/execute all the languages you've thus far mentioned -- including brainfuck -- within an org-mode file which employs a dialect of lisp to make it all happen as the plain text file is rendered MAGICAL.
http://orgmode.org/manual/Languages.html#Languages
https://searchcode.com/file/121541623/libs/ob-brainfuck.el

That's one of the things I like about programming languages though--way easier to pick up new ones than natural languages, especially for me.

They're all `natural' ... or at least equally `artificial'/man_made, Skinart Hephy ... Illustrated Man.
Though sometimes it's the programming paradigms a language will support, allow, and promote as per linguistic relativity which matters MORE -- cognitively, expressively -- than a specific language a newb can wrap his or her mind around.
To wit, to my mind the functional paradigm learned during the same developmental interval in a learner's life as `Algebra' can facilitate the learning of BOTH in a synergistic mutually-reinforcing way which can help the learner refrain from imbuing special superstitious reverence for the notation revered by the math weenies who favor their notation over those employed by programming languages which support the functional paradigm.

 

[Skinart]

Touche. It didn't make it difficult for me to understand the language itself but the changing syntactical quirks is what caused the mindfuck.

I'm doing mandarin. Trust me it's a mindfuck. I'll soon be tetralingual (including french because I know a little bit of it)

Excellent choice! Mandarin is the closest I have to a second natural language. I'm way out of practice though. The last time I tried to speak it, the guy I talked to said, "Not bad, your tones were about 25%." So... pretty much random!

My study of Mandarin gave me a super power. I can read in my dreams. For a while, I could even read Mandarin in my dreams, but only the characters I actually knew.

Personal recommendation: get a copy of Vtrain. Pardon my shill, but:

Vtrain is a flashcard program that allows for complicated flashcards. It uses rich text format, and IIRC, you can embed images. You can also embed audio. That's a huge one. Audio flashcards are wiz.

But it does more than that. It leverages forgetting curves. The longer you wait to refresh your memory, the longer the refreshed memory will remain--provided you didn't actually forget it. On the other hand, just cranking away on something you know doesn't help much at all. Each time you successfully remember, the longer you can go without refreshing and still remember--especially if you are using it.

It's built on the shoebox method. In the shoebox method you have a series of shoeboxes. A basic system of four boxes would look like this:

1: Review tomorrow.
2: Review in three days.
3: Review in a week.
4: Review in a month.

Every time you get a card right, it goes into the next shoebox. Every time you get one wrong, it starts its journey all over.

With Vtrain, you don't have to worry about the bookkeeping, and it has better bookkeeping. You might have a hundred cards in box 2, but only 30 of them are up for review today. Each card is on it's own timer. Pretty slick.

You can customize the number and timing on the shoeboxes. Then, you just load up for your daily review, and review only the things you need to. Huge timesaver. Hard words get reviewed more, easy words you end up never needing to review at all, and all without you having to keep track of anything.

Downside: very utilitarian. It looks like a Windows application from the 90's.

 

[Skinart]

*heavy sigh*
Here we go again.
Got the hammer and tongs ready?

It's your language-based bias induced by the (mis)use of languages employing ITERATION which finds you (mis)representing and mis-characterizing the lisps in this way;
One can do much in the lisps via RECURSION which allows one to `recur' rather than reITERATE.
Of course one can iterate on both lists and vectors as well as exploit recursion on the -- singly linked -- lists available via the lisps.

Psst: I was making a toehold. But I understand your objection. A foreach loop in something like Python is substantially more limited. Delegates in C# are closer--but which is easier to explain to a neophyte programmer? The little lie of foreach loops to get them started with iterating? Or talking about processing arrays of pointers to functions?

They're all `natural' ... or at least equally `artificial'/man_made, Skinart Hephy ... Illustrated Man.

I understand your point, but it doesn't make the natural languages stick the way programming languages can. To me, that's the defining feature between the two: one I can learn readily, the other requires an insane amount of dedication to be kinda sorta coherent.

Though sometimes it's the programming paradigms a language will support, allow, and promote as per linguistic relativity which matters MORE -- cognitively, expressively -- than a specific language a newb can wrap his or her mind around.
To wit, to my mind the functional paradigm learned during the same developmental interval in a learner's life as `Algebra' can facilitate the learning of BOTH in a synergistic mutually-reinforcing way which can help the learner refrain from imbuing special superstitious reverence for the notation revered by the math weenies who favor their notation over those employed by programming languages which support the functional paradigm.

My math proofs always got extra scrutiny because they were algorithm flavored... Dunno why that was such a problem. They were correct, and I almost always managed to demonstrate that successfully. That one time I didn't still rankles because it was correct. Their rebuttal involved cases accounted for and implicitly non-existent because the only way to get there was to defy the rules of engagement.

 

[gps]

My study of Mandarin gave me a super power.
I can read in my dreams.
For a while, I could even read Mandarin in my dreams, but only the characters I actually knew.

So may we assume that the `reading' you were doing did not require subvocalization or the sounding-out of the characters in your dreams?
If so then you might as well have been `reading' Mongolian ... right?

What I totally LOVE about the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logogram shared by the Han and Mongolians is they cut the tongue off `lingu'istics; they bypass the left hemisphere's bias towards streams of syllables, streams of phonemes ... and allow one to exploit visually-encoded semantemes.
Rumor has it that people in both China and Mongolia can `read' -- visually -- the same texts but can't understand each other's spoken-word readings of the same symbols.
Unlike `The West' its how things LOOK which is more important than how things SOUND.



Though, to be honest, I'm more impressed with what logogram-usng Japanese coders have done vis-a-vis bridging the gaps between logograms and sequential streams of alphabetic characters
https://en.wikipedia.rg/wiki/Logogram

The packages allowing one to use the w3m web browser within emacs has pretty much been dominantly implemented by Japanese coders.
https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/emacs-w3m

Though -- to return to mental grasping power at (st)age of development -- my learning the orthographic visual grammar of draftsman and engineers starting at age 14 allowed me to transcend some of the mind-numbing horse shit the English-misusing teachers and my fellow institutionalized-in-compulsory-miseducation `students' did in high school and beyond.
It's hard to bullshit when you have to draw some physically extent THING to scale and specify what material(s) it's made of.
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=orthographic+projection+examples

Hmmm ... there's something or other nascently interesting at the intersection of APL and logograms too.
The APL language has a non-destructive backspace which allows overstrike compositing.
{aside: it's used to create the quad quote, for example}
I can imagine Chinese and Japanese logo grams generated by firstly projecting a basic stem part of a symbol, then overstriking additional nuances until the final logogram is generated.
Though successive passes would need to have `strokes' started relative to features on previously layed-down passes rather than simple `rubber stamping'.

All for this one.

 

[Skinart]

So may we assume that the `reading' you were doing did not require subvocalization or the sounding-out of the characters in your dreams?
If so then you might as well have been `reading' Mongolian ... right?

What I totally LOVE about the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logogram shared by the Han and Mongolians is they cut the tongue off `lingu'istics; they bypass the left hemisphere's bias towards streams of syllables, streams of phonemes ... and allow one to exploit visually-encoded semantemes.
Rumor has it that people in both China and Mongolia can `read' -- visually -- the same texts but can't understand each other's spoken-word readings of the same symbols.
Unlike `The West' its how things LOOK which is more important than how things SOUND.

The first (academic) year of study (intensive summer course covering three quarters in eight weeks), I developed the ability to read English in my dreams. It was the second summer that I developed the ability to read Mandarin.

I'm not sure of the Mongolian angle as Mongols have their own script--but it's definitely true between Mandarin and Cantonese, which are mutually unintelligible when spoken. Cantonese even has more tones. But they can communicate by passing notes.

The Japanese orthography is similarly logographic, but the meanings vary a bit. Some of this is because Chinese is monosyllabic and Japanese is multi-syllabic. Granted there are plenty of words in Chinese that challenge the claim of monosyllabism, but by and large they are monosyllable words jammed together like a portmanteau. And a lot of words are doubled monosyllables.

Still, there's a goodly amount of overlap in the meanings the Japanese use and the meanings the Chinese use. It is very interesting.

 

[gps]

Psst: I was making a toehold.
Or talking about processing arrays of pointers to functions?

Singly-linked lists of cons cells are readily communicated pictorially FIRST before introducing neophytes to `cons', `as the fundamental composition/synthesis function and car'[, and `cdr' as corresponding analytical/decomposition functions
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=cons+cell+diagrams

The bitch of teaching A language -- any computer language -- first is that it prejudices what ever follows.
How does one describe a cons cell once those in the audience have been weened on data having -- in the earliest of binding senses -- `types'?
Whereas if one learns about cons cells FIRST, one's world view is not upset when the silliness of data types is introduced which Scheme coders would use a Numeric Tower to do an end run around thereby obviating the need -- in C-like languages -- for type casting.
ref: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=Scheme's+Numeric+Tower

I'm still in favor of using Scheme -- perhaps via Dr. Racket -- as a/the First programming Language a student learns, BTW.

I understand your point, but it doesn't make the natural languages stick the way programming languages can.
To me, that's the defining feature between the two: one I can learn readily, the other requires an insane amount of dedication to be kinda sorta coherent.

My recurring problems with would-be `natural'/spoken languages are two-fold.
(1)I hate grammar when contrasted with syntax; grammar is overly complicated for what little value it adds as contrasted with syntax used to implement machine readable notations.

(2) I experience a hell of a lot more frustration using language interPersonally & socially than I do either intraPersonally or humanly-computerly.

Meaning ... though I may have been amongst the best pronouncers of French in my high school class according to the teacher, I had a low degree of interest in finding someone who spoke French with which to have a discussion in which my pronunciation, spelling, and grammar were found lacking.
I typically found it more important to have various languages/notations available for inTRApersonal and solipsistically-personal use to make accurate mental models whether or not I could translate them out into the world of head-bound-by-NATURAL-languages fucktards with their petty concerns about spelling/orthography, grammar, punctuation, vocabulary, and such.

My math proofs always got extra scrutiny because they were algorithm flavored... Dunno why that was such a problem.
They were correct, and I almost always managed to demonstrate that successfully.
That one time I didn't still rankles because it was correct.
Their rebuttal involved cases accounted for and implicitly non-existent because the only way to get there was to defy the rules of engagement.

As you know ... I HATE math teachers and math weenies as a general rule ... and for similar and related reasons.
To the extent math IS `notions' it IS metaphysics; to the extent it IS it's `notations' it is liturgical language on par with liturgical Latin and Sanskrit.
And the vast majority of the assholes in the math camp(s) superstitiously confuse and conflate the metaphysical underpinnings of their deep-structural semantics with mere surface-structural notations via liturgical `standard notation'.
I wish I knew where all my old math teachers were buried so I could go piss on their graves.

Cheers!

BTW ... I'm happy to have spent the day bantering with my old friend.
Good to chat with you again, old man.
Logging off for tonight now.

 

[Skinart]

Good talking with you again as well. Hope the creek is still making pretty sculptures for you.

 

[gps]

Hope the creek is still making pretty sculptures for you.

Indeed.
Though `pretty' confusing.
Gender confused, politically confused, socially migratory and labile.
About anything I care to project onto It's FLOW ...`Thee Flow'.

I put obstacles in It's stream of consciousness and IT just takes-in-stride these stepping stones favoring pretentious apes goal-directedly desiring to get from one side to the other without necessarily enjoying the journey.

Some of his/her mass is pooled up and held back by my obstructive shenanigans.
And my transgender, trans-human, trans-rational, trans-logical Old Friend keeps right on generating destructive-constructive kinetic sculptures for me to be to behold whatever I'm foolish enough and wise enough to project and/or apperceive.

Busyness as usual on THAT fluid front.



Captured any more frozen moments in those back woods mountains in recent years to share with the city-bound shut-ins of the world constrained to contemplating their navels, mental ages, and masturbatory -- mental and otherwise -- `grasping' power ?

Ahhhh ... alas ... what some of us resort to in ever-so-`logical', ever-so-`rational' attempts to `get a grip'.

 

[Black Rose]

The elegance someone will use to put down anothers position makes for a loss of words.

 

[gps]

The elegance someone will use to put down another's position makes for a loss of words.

Put down?
Are you attempting to `put down' my attempt to broaden or `put in another' PERSPECTIVE?
As if it's not part and parcel with The Human Condition?

Are we really all this Thin Skinned?

Skinart and I -- in other groups -- have spoken of, and in his case `provided PICTURES of', NATURE.

Being IN NATURE has therapeutic effects and AFFECTS for ME ... if no one else.
I recommend it to you and anyone else who feels their `position' has been -- unilaterally, as if I COULD with your efforts to withstand not withstanding -- `put down'.

Happy holidays, AK!
Pleased to make your acquaintance over the last few months.
I look forward to more interAction in the upcoming new year, my friend.

 

[Black Rose]

and masturbatory -- mental and otherwise -- `grasping' power ?

If everything said is so far is not to be taken seriously then the topics is worthless and thus our discussion is worthless. Further discussion is meant to not then relate to the validity of the subject matter but to continue with comments like so above that shows no respect for the person nor persons that take this matter seriously and have taken time to think out what they think is correct and incorrect when trying to understand IQ. If people here are only meant for you to show how wrongheaded we are and not to actually discuss the right or wrong of the subject matter, then the discussion turns into a mockery of people you definitively believe are wrong and worthy of mockery. Mockery as in such an eloquent quote above.