this post was submitted on 31 Dec 2023
59 points (87.3% liked)

Programming

17313 readers
192 users here now

Welcome to the main community in programming.dev! Feel free to post anything relating to programming here!

Cross posting is strongly encouraged in the instance. If you feel your post or another person's post makes sense in another community cross post into it.

Hope you enjoy the instance!

Rules

Rules

  • Follow the programming.dev instance rules
  • Keep content related to programming in some way
  • If you're posting long videos try to add in some form of tldr for those who don't want to watch videos

Wormhole

Follow the wormhole through a path of communities [email protected]

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
59
Mathematicians and software (self.programming)
submitted 10 months ago by 3h5Hne7t1K to c/[email protected]
29 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

It is often echoed that mathematicians make excellent software engineers, and that their logic-adjacent work will translate efficiently into coding and designing.

I have found this to be almost universally untrue. I might even say the inverse is true.

While I and many of my peers have capacity to navigate the mathematical world, it certainly is not what sets us (at least me) apart when designing clever algorithms and software tricks.

Point being: I dont think the property/trait that makes good programmers is mathematical literacy.

I would love to hear what others experience is regarding this.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago

"From computer science papers/academic texts I know this method of reading works perfectly"

This is almost certainly due to pure familiarity. CS papers are just as indecipherable to unfamiliar persons. Possibly even more since things like complexity are heavily used, without any explanation of what it is. Data structures are another common one that the vast majority of non-CS people would not understand when referenced.

I know because this is exactly how I felt coming from an intermediate mathematics background.