Contrasting Visual and Nonvisual

Reply - Christina - February 2023 Five Questions (5Q)

> I’m visually oriented and have found this proven to mine own betterment. I bash (pun, haha) my head against programming when it solely speaks to “coders”, a cognitively very medium-selected population. If I have concrete embodiments and exemplars for code, it makes more sense to me. It’s something I comforting about Lisp: the parenthesis and cons-cell tree logic are much more lucid to me than the open tabbed syntactic muddle of more mainstream programming languages.

I'm aggressively non-visual. So much so that I am still utterly baffled by the idea of a picture. I mean, how on Earth do you squish three-dimensional reality into two dimensions on a page, a screen, a canvas, or what have you? If I sit here and try to grok it, you'd probably see figurative smoke coming out of the top of my head.

And yet, I love Lisp. Lisp, and S-expressions in particular, helped me understand trees.

Re: Using notation to understand the world

It's a funny contrast, though funny isn't quite the right word. Two people with totally dissimilar perspectives arrive at the same place.