The Sapir Whorf hypothesis (language defines what we can perceive and think) is mostly wrong for natural language, but true for programming. Computer languages don't differ in what they can do but in how they let us think.
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Interesting thought: How would one be able to tell if their own language had become stuck in such a minimum or saddle-point? Just in the same way the Piraha can't discover Einstein's relativity, are there things we can't discover because of language boundaries? How would we know?
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The Piraha could apparently not even learn how to count to ten with 8 months training. Perhaps they have a mutation that affects numerosity or other things? They must have been heavily inbreeding in a tiny population.
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