Verbs vs Nouns

Yesterday, I watched the video linked at the end of this post and again confirmed that everything is about grammar!

If you’re not in the mood for some nerdy ramblings, feel free to skip to the video link at the bottom😉

I’ve always been known as a grammar nerd (actually, the term used to succinctly describe me is an even worse n-word, and it’s not “nitpicker”, either…).

In primary school in Poland, our teacher divided our Polish classes into “literature” and “grammar.” We marked the latter with a big “G” in the margin of our copybooks.

I much preferred those G-type classes, because they didn’t require much effort beyond just listening and then doing the exercises / homework. It was almost like math — there were these objects and categories, like noun, pronoun, verb, tense, gender, case, and a set of rules that guided their usage. And when they were being talked about and described, it all immediately made sense (to me, at least) in relation to what I already knew (since I knew how to speak the language).

By the time I was in high school, I’d been learning English for some time, and I really loved it, because again — its grammar was a clear (enough) set of rules that didn’t require memorizing many arbitrary exceptions or tables of verb conjugations (with the exception (pun intended!) of the so-called “irregular verbs” which do the past forms the “ablaut” way (like sing, sang, sung)) or case endings (non-existent in English except maybe for the possessive “‘s”).

Sidenote: I know, I know, English has like twelve or sixteen grammatical tenses, but they are all just combinations of a few parameters and are very easy to form.

You need “future perfect continuous”? “I will have been walking”

How about “future in the past perfect continuous”? “I would have been walking”

This is as easy as it gets, people.

So for me, English was something like:

Here’s a few “keywords” (I, you, he; to be, to have; -ing, -ed) and how to put them together to build phrases (subject-verb-object), and off you go: all you need to work on now is learning more verbs and nouns to express whatever you want. It almost sounds like a programming language, if you replace “verb” with “function” or “method” and “object” with “argument” (although, arguably (pun intended!), you can still use the term “object” if you’re into the whole Object-Oriented paradigm (which I am)).

Anyway, fast forward to today, when I’m a born-and-bred Pole living in Ireland and working as a software engineer, dealing with language and grammar every day: being a grammar N*** on company Slack and Notion, correcting spelling in method and class names in pull requests (the worst nightmare is when a typo gets baked into a database column name or a public API method forever!) and nerding out on the differences between US and UK spelling.

I also sound like an American because I chose that accent back in the 1980s, watching Miami Vice; but that’s not relevant here.

Obviously, programming languages are also very much about grammar, and programming is “expressing whatever you want” in a language. Yep, everything is about grammar!

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Now, imagine my flabbergast when I started watching this video:

Verbs vs Nouns: The Word Order That Shaped User Interfaces
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jP5PQ8ix7JE

and had my grammar bias confirmed again, this time regarding user interfaces.

The video’s central claim is that user interfaces are shaped by grammar, not just visuals.
Specifically, whether an interface is organized around verbs (actions) or nouns (objects) changes how humans think about using computers.

The speaker argues that the history of computing is, in part, the history of whether we put verbs first or nouns first.

The whole video is very interesting and draws you in with the tension between noun-centricity and verb-centricity, even more than an episode of Miami Vice!

For me as a software engineer and a programmer, it’s like those Polish grammar classes — you can just listen and everything makes sense, since you’re familiar with all those user interfaces and even have your preferences (I’m more on the Object.DoSomethingToIt() side, mainly because of the discoverability aspect – by specifying the object first, you then know what’s possible. I like Object-Oriented Design, sue me!).

The video also tries to predict what will happen now when AI is redefining how humans interact with computers again.

Highly recommended!

Verbs vs Nouns: The Word Order That Shaped User Interfaces