411–420 of 465 posts
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Yes, but “language is fundamentally recursive” doesn’t mean the same thing as “recursion is fundamentally linguistic”. Language is just one example of a recursive structure.
Can you come up with some conception of recursion that doesn't involve symbols referring to themselves, directly or indirectly? Ie what is left of recursion when you remove the linguistic component?
Good code doesn’t just solve a problem, it solves it in a way that’s readable and modular. I think the problem-solving part of coding requires math skills, while the organization part requires writing skills. The organization part affects the problem-solving part, because if you write messy code (that you can’t reread once you forget or extend without rewriting) you’ll quickly get overwhelmed. Writing large math proo…
A lot of people in this type of threads always makes the same mistake: confusing what math is with branches of math, or rather, ways in which math is used. The way the education system is built certainly contributes to this. I've always found the car metaphor to work very good to understand this: A car is a machine that can transport itself to point A to B (some other rules apply). There are different types of cars,…
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I understand you have strong opinions, I just don't understand why. In math are highly concerned with structures and abstraction. We have things called operators. They aren't just addition and multiplication. We also use those words to describe different operations. They have things like groups, rings, fields, and algebras. Yes, plural. The purpose of these things is to create logical frameworks. It matters not what…
> I understand you have strong opinions, I just don't understand why. As someone that is "on the other side of the fence", and getting flamed for it, maybe I can shed some light since I have the other perspective as well. IMO, The reason for not seeing eye to eye is (for example) akin to saying "word problems are math". (Thinking of a grade school word problems for common reference). Yes, they are readily mapped to m…
> That's where the talking past each other comes in...
Yes, I agree we're misunderstanding each other because we're using different definitions but "you've" rejected "mine" without defining "yours" and expecting everyone to understand. Of course that'll lead to confusion. You can reject the mathematicians definition of math, but you sure gotta say more than "trust me" and it's a pretty wild thing to do, especially as non mathematicians.
The problem here is one side who's dabbled in cooking says "a chef makes desserts" and chefs are responding "we do a lot more than that". Maybe there's a few chefs that go "yeah all I do is dessert" and everyone points to that while ignoring the second part of their sentence is "but that's just my speciality." Wouldn't you think that conversation is insane? The only reason it's obviously so is because we all know what a chef is and agree on the definition. But who is better qualified to define the chef's job? The chef or consumer?
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Most coding doesn't need much of any math past boolean logic and very basic set operations. I'm much more likely to spend my time studying DB and interface schemas to understand how something works than doing a lot of mathy fiddling. Sure, some people write game engines and such, but even much of 3D graphics doesn't need anything more complicated than the first half of a linear algebra course.
The difficulty is in how many relationships you need to keep in mind, not in how hard each of them are. Just like in math. BTW relational DBs are math.
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Storing a string in some abstraction is not a mathematical operation. I'm done with this thread, it's going way too far down too many rabbit holes. The quarks that make up the matter that the computers are made of are pure "math". There, now I've moved the goalposts.
That is a narrow perspective of mathematics and computer science. Assigning a variable is a mathematical operation. It is a logical state transition. This is formalized in Programming Language Theory. We are not talking about quarks. We are talking about lines of code which are objectively mathematical statements, no matter how non-mathematical they seem to you subjectively. You start with a practical problem to solv…
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That is a narrow perspective of mathematics and computer science. Assigning a variable is a mathematical operation. It is a logical state transition. This is formalized in Programming Language Theory. We are not talking about quarks. We are talking about lines of code which are objectively mathematical statements, no matter how non-mathematical they seem to you subjectively. You start with a practical problem to solv…
You confuse map with the territory. By the same logic you can say quarks are mathematics, because they are modeled by a theory that has some mathematics in it.
In the case of code, we can argue that the map is the territory.
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CREATE, READ, UPDATE, DELETE are fundamentally mathematical in nature. In a typical implementation these are database operations. That involves relational algebra operations, state transitions, boolean logic. The READ part can be a very complex SQL query (composed of many algebraic operations) but even the simplest query (SELECT * from t where ID = 1) is filtering a set based on a predicate. That is mathematics. No o…
It's almost the argument of programming vs computer science coming out here. This is math: {x | x.id = 1} OTOH, a SQL query is a SQL query. This thread is hilarious though. It's like - Cashier: here is your change. - Customer: you did math! - Cashier, no, I gave you change. - Customer: that IS math! - Cashier: You mean, I used math to give you change? - Customer: No, giving change doesn't use math, it IS math!!!!" [2…
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You could say that math is behind the structure of a leaf, but the farmer doesn't care about that. Keep moving the goalpost all you want, I don't have time to argue these pointless things, and I stopped reading after the first sentence of your comment. I'm done here.
You seem really angry at the field of Computer Science for some reason. We are talking about textbook CS fundamentals. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantics_(computer_science)
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> You can study and do well in computer science with minimal knowledge of most of the core mathematical subjects. You will fail at Theoretical Computer Science without mathematical proficiency. Go read some textbooks and papers in theoretical CS. It is a subfield of mathematics. Theorems and proofs. Rigorous and difficult mathematics. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theoretical_computer_science
I've read plenty of theoretical computer science papers over the last 30+ years, and while some of it requires "rigorous and difficult mathematics" that is by no means universal. I wrote my MSc thesis on the use of statistical methods for reducing error rates for OCR, and most of the papers in my literature review hardly required more than basic arithmetic and algebra. So I stand by my statement. Sure, there are subs…
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Picking what letters to use for what things can still be a struggle. Mathematicians do have to deal with difficulties in naming things.
They just invent new characters.