Programming is not math

The central idea of the linked post is that programming have long ago spread to more circles apart of math, and if in the past solve math problemas was the #1 activity that is not longer the case, and then, programming is dominated by other activities apart of math.

But, some people insist to teach programming ignoring that and still thinking that programming is a tool for math.

Now, I think is more right to say math is a tool for programming.

"Nobody will expect a physicist to fix their cars, or a biologist to cure their sickness. Nobody studies physics to work as a mechanics."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyatt_Regency_walkway_collapse

"It was once pointed out to me that math major undergrads generally perform better than most computer science undergrad in many PhD programs."

There is a significant difference between computer science and archaeology, as academic disciplines. And it's not what you might think it is. A computer science student with out a Ph.D., with only an undergraduate degree, is (I hope[1]) fully competent to be gainfully employed in the field doing actual programming. An archaeology student without a Ph.D. is a shovel-bum, a ditch-digger, perhaps with some experience using surveying equipment, but certainly not qualified to do property title-related stuff.

[1] At most decent schools, anyway. The school whenceforth I came, for example, taught graphics and networking and compilers and data bases, along with basic data structures and algorithms, and a certain amount of actual programming. Someone coming out with an undergraduate degree certainly wouldn't be an ideal candidate to lead an important project, and certainly wouldn't have 5-years experience as a full-stack web developer in Elm and Clojure. But they would have the knowledge base to learn those things without big gaping holes in their understanding. You know, what used to be jokingly referred to as an "entry level" position: basic competence without expertise.

It's really good that some form of craft programming has spread as "not math". But let's not kid ourselves that math isn't programming, and programming isn't math.

It's like finding your way from St Louis to Chicago (in the US) or Rheims to Paris, say. You don't need to know that you're navigating on the surface of a spherical body. You just need to know a little map reading, or listen to Google Navigation giving you apparently planar directions and execute them. Just because your journey looks and feels flat does not mean you live on a flat earth.

You can even keep up a flat earth view of the cosmos, but ultimately, you'll end up re-inventing Geocentrism and embellishing cycles with epicycles. And you'll be mystified by how a few wizards can fly non-straight-line routes from New York to London and get there faster than your flat earth "straight line".

I hereby acknowledge, swear or affirm that the previous is an analogy, and therefore can be carried to far for purposes of building a straw man counter argument.

That was my thought too, math is obviously tied very closely to language. And programming did come from CS which came from math. Web/App dev is just so far downstream from all of the math, that people in those roles can get away with ignoring it.

In fact, if you accept the premise of math as a language, most of the piece can be boiled down to: "language skills help programming skills, whether that language is mathematics or not".

Another nitpick:

> A common variation on this: without a CS degree, you can’t build anything substantial. Which, ha ha! Don’t tell the venture capitalists! They’re down there on Sand Hill Road giving actual money to hundreds of people building software projects without any formal qualifications whatsoever. In fact, they do it so often that the college-dropout-turned-genius-programmer is our primary Silicon Valley archetype of success. And monetarily, their strategy seems be to working out for them, if the fleets of Teslas on 280 are any indication.

1. Tesla is not a "software project" and I can't imagine that building a car is light on math.

2. Elon Musk has a degree in physics and dropped out of a Stanford EE PhD. He's not a "college dropout" or a "genius programmer." The CTO, Straubel, also has (non CS) engineering degrees from Stanford.

3. To my knowledge Tesla was initially 100% funded out of Musk's PayPal money, not venture capital.

"Math is irrelevant, look at Tesla!" is simply a ridiculous thing to say.

I have a lot of psychiatrist friends. I had psychiatric treatment at some point, befriended my former doctor in the process and then his group of friends.

It's amazing how much they have chemistry as a conceptual primitive -- just as much as I have linear algebra as a primitive. They drop "oxygenase" (or something) in casual conversation like I drop "eigenvector".

And 90% of what they do is talk to depressed people and sometimes hand some Prozac or some Xanax!