Interesting article. It talks about "solving" maths problems. I wonder if reading a proof uses the language processing. To me I feel like it must do. The subjective experience to me of reading a proof is similar to reading any reasoned argument (like a legal argument). The study was conducted with relatively novice coders. As it mentions, maybe the more proficient make more use of language processing. Definitely a very interesting experiment though. The assumption that programming is a language task is pretty baked in to a lot of people's thinking. This jumped out at me as well;

because computer programming is such a new invention that we know that there couldn't be any hardwired mechanisms that make us good programmers

I don't think this is strictly true. While obviously such abilities couldn't have risen via evolution yet (in response to programming being invented), it could still be the fact that there are hardwired mechanisms hanging around that make us good programmers. It certainly seems to me at least (controversial maybe!) that there is some kind of correlation with ASD tendancies and coding ability (in the present-of-coding anyway). Probably my #1 favourite observation of BV (the people we think of as good programmers are the people who are best at "playing computer" in their head).

I like the experiment but this paper’s conclusions are a bit overgeneralized. https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/ke6x2i/learning_to_program_a_computer_is_s[…]ilar_to/gg1enyl In short, they used toy programs that had no meaningful structure or variable names.