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Programming is not math

sarahmei.com

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Re: Programming is not math

#111

Post by phazmatis »

rayiner wrote: post #34

> If you took a dynamic methods class in school, you know that big-O notation is pretty much meaningless in the real world. Which is to say, it doesn’t matter how an algorithm operates on an arbitrary set of data I once spent a day or two trying to figure out why our network simulation was grinding to a halt.[1] The research guys, of course, blamed us engineering guys (you're writing slow code!) Turns out that one of…

So this person was not only unaware that the algorithm was aad, they also were unaware that one algorithm oould be worse than another? Unless that second part is true, you juat have an employee making poor decisons. More aaths won't help with that.

Re: Programming is not math

#112

Post by phazmatis »

Programming is mostly engineering. You are rearranging abstracted units. Usually, you are piping data from point A to B, in which case there exists one algorithm to do that. Sure, some devs have deeper problems, but the majority of us are simply building data pathways.

Re: Programming is not math

#113

Post by felipellrocha »

wvenable wrote: post #86
felipellrocha wrote: post #21

I've seen someone take a piece of code from 72 lines down to 3 lines by just doing some simple mathematical analysis before actually getting to refactoring. The code was also simpler, and easier to understand. Do you need math for be a good programmer? No. Does it help to know math while programming? Absolutely.

I've also seen a programmer waste 6 months on code that didn't solve the problem because he was a poor communicator and got all the requirements wrong. I don't disagree with your point but it doesn't really mean that much. A good programmer needs to be well rounded -- understand math, logic, language, human nature, etc. If you're calculating missile trajectories; math is going to be a more important component. If you…

(1) I don't understand how the programmer wasting 6 months relates to my example. (2) I don't believe you know what math is/isn't, calculating missile trajectories is just one way of doing math. Math is not the same thing as Arithmetic. Also, depending on the type of plugin, math can be quite a useful tool. For starters, if you're playing with Facebook's graph api, knowing about graph theory can be quite handy.

Re: Programming is not math

#114

Post by felipellrocha »

mcguire wrote: post #99

I am starting to get sick of these things. > Doing Riemann sums in Fortran is about as math-oriented an introduction to programming as you can get. No. Math is not calculus . Math is more than calculus, more than arithmetic. If anyone asserted that "Programming is arithmetic" (or "...is not..."), they'd get their buttocks laughed off of them. But that is exactly what Sarah Mei is arguing against here. > You might be…

This. I loved that string concatenation example! I still don't understand how people can be so against big-O notation when it's such a simple idea, with so many applications.

Re: Programming is not math

#115

Post by TheLoneWolfling »

mcguire wrote: post #99

I am starting to get sick of these things. > Doing Riemann sums in Fortran is about as math-oriented an introduction to programming as you can get. No. Math is not calculus . Math is more than calculus, more than arithmetic. If anyone asserted that "Programming is arithmetic" (or "...is not..."), they'd get their buttocks laughed off of them. But that is exactly what Sarah Mei is arguing against here. > You might be…

That being said, in some languages string1 + string2 + ... + stringn isn't an O(n^2) operation. (Notably, if your string type is a rope, or if the language has a nary string concatenation operator, or is guaranteed to use something along the lines of a StringBuffer intermediary object)
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