George Rebane

In his ‘Code to Joy’ essay (featured in the Jun-Jul 2018 issue of 1843, the Economist’s bi-monthly features magazine), science writer and author Andrew Smith almost discovers Sapir-Whorf.  But not quite, and therein lies a tale.  The man had been writing about computer technology and its impact on our lives for most of his career before he realized that he really didn’t know exactly how software worked, and it was the software that enabled all those wonderful things that most of us now take for granted in our daily round.

So he asked, “Is learning to code in middle age a fool’s errand or a committed act of digital citizenship?”, and started his quest for a programming language which he could learn well enough to code up a simple task.  On his travels through the programming world he interviews important personages and finds a well-known mentor to help him as he inevitably hits the ‘dark night of the soul’ when all gleaned progress and understanding fades into a hopeless morass of imminent defeat.  But with a mini-epiphany here and there along the way, he perseveres and finally celebrates his finished and fully functional Python code snippet.

What Smith’s trail of tears illustrates is another confirmation of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis cum dictum that a person’s language(s) bound their capacity for thought.  We have visited the ramifications of S-W in these pages before (e.g. here) in the context of languages such as English and mathematics.  The bottom line of it all is that every human being is not capable of thinking all human thoughts; they are limited by the languages they have mastered.  And Smith’s essay is a clear illustration of this, even though he is not able to connect it with S-W.  (He is not alone, almost none of our ‘educators’ have this understanding as they mangle our schools’ curricula and/or teach in our classrooms.)

The ramifications of S-W necessarily extend beyond thought to communications and understanding.  What you cannot think, you cannot communicate, and what is beyond your lexicon, you cannot understand what someone else is trying to tell you.  Cultures with such language deficits have a difficult time making progress since it is hard for them to come together to solve problems and make more complex plans for productive cooperative enterprises.  It has been the expansion of language that has always provided the bases for the advancement of cultures in the sense of securing more resources, insuring their survival, and increasing their quality of life.

Think of what your life would be if you had no concept of nor ability to communicate ‘before/after’,  'future/past', ‘more/less’, ‘harder/easier’, ‘if/then’, numbering/counting things in your environment, expressing the subjunctive, considering counterfactuals (“A counterfactual thought occurs when a person modifies a factual prior event and then assesses the consequences of that change.”), quantifying risk (the notions of likelihood/probability), … .

In the same manner, Smith and others not familiar with the art of coding have no concept of the kinds of primitives that are both necessary and possible in various programming languages.  And therefore, given a problem to solve that involves the manipulation of specific types of data or implementing a user task, they simply have no place to start thinking about how to approach and structure a solution (i.e. to algorize).  Smith runs into this problem without appreciating it when he initially considers which one of the current 1,700+ programming languages he should first learn.  His mentor takes him through such considerations, but without connecting to the larger linguistic landscape of thought and communications taught by Sapir-Whorf.

Today much (almost all?) of our discussion of social issues is also hampered by the various boundaries that exist in the (partially) shared language people use domestically, which, of course, is immensely amplified when translation is required between languages with widely different roots and current capacities for understanding and expressing thought.  The comment streams of blogs (e.g. RR’s) along with countless letters-to-the-editor attest to the so far insurmountable difficulties Americans have in communicating with each other, no matter how sincere are their efforts.