Poor, Poor Child. You have no idea. • Hacker News Board

Re: Poor, Poor Child. You have no idea.

#71

Post by kls » Fri, Jan 15, 2010, 6:21 PM UTC

loup-vaillant wrote: post #62

dandelany wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"especially for a web developer" is the important part. As a fellow web developer, I agree. I'd certainly like to get into the mathier side of programming someday, but it's rarely necessary for my day-to-day operations. Remember, he's writing a letter to his former self, so the advice applies more to his life than it does in general.

The amount of math which you need in programming may not enormous, but it is certainly not limited to boolean algebra, and it needs to be internalized. For instance, if you don't understand that a function is a mathematical object like any other, you won't understand some very useful things in day to day web programming: closures, lambda, `map`, `filter`… Without those, my web site generator[1] would have been much m…

Exactly you can do it without math, but elegance and performance are much easier with math on your side. The one I always find funny is the massive volumes of time money and energy spent "Load Testing" code, when some simple algebra and statistics can rapidly give you a projection of your scalability. Then you only have to run a test to validate you work. Yuo can test load without math but it sure saves a lot of time and money to do it with it.

It is always people that don't understand math and its application that say oh, I don't need it for what I do "web development I am looking at you" and then wonder why their systems are, complex, ill performant, and inelegant.

Please learn math before you say you don't need it. Or more specific to this article stating that programming is complex / hard and following that with you don't need math. It's only hard because you are not using math.

I have done 3D simulation, AI, robotics, embedded and now web over the coarse of my career and the only complex systems that I have run into where designed without the assistance of mathmatics.

Re: Poor, Poor Child. You have no idea.

#72

Post by kls » Fri, Jan 15, 2010, 6:28 PM UTC

m0th87 wrote: post #10

shin_lao wrote: post #2

Well, I'm sorry to say I strongly disagree with the mathematics part. Basis in linera algebra are a definitive plus and helped me approach programming in a sensible way.

I think it really depends on what you want to make. How does math help you make a CRUD application, for example?

Efficient input validation, load calculations, memory consumption calculations, More efficient data storage,

Re: Poor, Poor Child. You have no idea.

#73

Post by jeffcoat » Fri, Jan 15, 2010, 7:26 PM UTC

jpendry wrote: post #66

cabalamat wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If Dijkstra was still alive and well, and you put him, Guy Steele, and Don Knuth in a room and asked me to pick two of the three to spend the day with Or -- and more relevant to their professional competence -- to develop a large, complex and safety-critical system, such as air traffic control; I wouldn't choose Dijkstra over Knuth or Steele for that job either.

you realize you're saying you wouldn't choose the guy that _invented_ semaphores right? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semaphore_(programming)

I think that's the point, yes. In software engineering, quantity has a quality all its own.

Re: Poor, Poor Child. You have no idea.

#74

Post by julius_geezer » Sat, Jan 16, 2010, 1:27 AM UTC

asnyder wrote: post #37

kristiandupont wrote: post #3

While there are clearly differences between languages, I think it is rather deterministic to put that much weight on the first language? My first language was GW Basic. By your logic, there wouldn't be much hope for me I guess..

"It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration." - Edsger Wybe Dijkstra

Dijkstra had an unfortunate fondness for the epigram. Cumulatively the epigrams have had the effect of making it easier to remember him as the guy who said bad things about GOTOs, Basic, Fortran, and OS-360, rather than as a pioneer in algorithms, concurrency, and programming languages. Still, I suppose it is something to be able to say pithy things in one's second (or at least not first) language.

Re: Poor, Poor Child. You have no idea.

#75

Post by cellis » Sat, Jan 16, 2010, 2:26 AM UTC

dangrossman wrote: post #55

I didn't need any advanced math to program until I started tackling computer vision problems. Estimating 3D surface normals and depth from multiple photos of an object? Break out the matrix solvers. Computing homographies between images? Better know what an eigenvector is.

For me it was "want to make a fish swim realistically with inverse kinematics"? Break out the Jacobian Matrices.

Although, to be intellectually honest, I went only went as far as to research this, and no further. I just didn't see it as worth the time.