Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

posted by martyb on Friday March 06 2020, @05:04AM   Printer-friendly
from the math-is-a-language-with-its-own-grammar-and-vocabulary dept.

I-Programmer runs a story [0] which says it might not be math chops, but language skills that make a good programmer.

This makes sense, at least to me. I'm a fair coder, and can certainly count, but would not consider my math skills to be high level. As a teenager, C.L. Dogson's Symbolic Logic/Game of Logic [1] was a great read, but wading through formulas and proofs has always made me feel like a 4 year old.

To each his own. For my main "Human" language - English - I'm a pretty good communicator, and that also reflects in the dozen or so coding "dialects" I've kept up with over the years. In basic training I was surprised to test very high at language skills when I absolutely detested spanish in high school (the teacher had something to do with it) and even after living with a German gal for quite some time now have only the rudiments of that language.

This story resonated because I agree with it, coming around to thinking a good thirty years ago that programming is more of a language than a math skill - just not specifically one for a "human" language.

I treat coding like writing a story, itself a variation of the scientific method: 1) first draft, 2 revise, 3 go to 2 until the screen's output matches what's in my head as closely as possible.

So, at least in my case, language skills being much better than math skills result in a fair ability to program.

The folks at Stack Overflow [2] had a long thread on a similar subject some time back. Soylentils, what do you think?

[0] https://www.i-programmer.info/news/99/13517.html
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Game_of_Logic
[2] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/157354/is-mathematics-necessary-for-programming


Original Submission

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 06 2020, @06:36AM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 06 2020, @06:36AM (#967317)

    All programming requires logical thought, but I can believe that doesn't necessarily translate into always being good at math. But they're related. But then, most intelligence is related in some way or another.

    Some programming skills probably relate more closely to (human) language skills. Programming relies on being able to simultaneously reason about multiple levels of abstraction, and programmers often enjoy jokes which rely on words with multiple meanings, or words which don't technically exist but still have clear meanings. This seems similar to me.

    As you go past basic levels in programming, it becomes clear that programming is not really about grappling with the syntax and getting the program to do what you want and not crash, but more about finding the vague and conflicting areas in what the program is supposed to do, which requires both logical thought and human skills. IMO, this depends more on experience than on math skills. Or you can go the other way, getting involved with algorithms, data, and optimization. I have never met anyone who's really good at this side of programming without also being quite good at math. But most programmers aren't required to excel in this area.

    I do have to say that while there is a large subset of programmers who operate entirely by the "draft, check, revise" method - and all programmers do this some of the time - but many don't operate this way most of the time. But the members of the "guess and check" group sometimes insist that theirs is the only way, and try to force everyone to adopt that methodology.

    Starting Score:    0  points
    Moderation   +1  
       Interesting=1, Total=1
    Extra 'Interesting' Modifier   0  

    Total Score:   1  
  • (Score: 2) by Bot on Friday March 06 2020, @08:47AM

    by Bot (3902) on Friday March 06 2020, @08:47AM (#967339) Journal

    Yes, It Is domain dependent. And one needs to consider organization and modularization of code, which is neither math nor language.
    Plus are we talking about analysts or coders? A coder that knows the compiler inside out and has no idea what a cosine is, is probably best suited for most tasks than a math PhD who did only Excel, mathematica and R.

    --
    Account abandoned.