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Olga Khazan writes in The Atlantic that learning to program involves a lot of Googling, logic, and trial-and-error—but almost nothing beyond fourth-grade arithmetic.
Victoria Fine explains how she taught herself how to code despite hating math. Her secret? Lots and lots of Googling. "Like any good Google query, a successful answer depended on asking the right question. “How do I make a website red” was not nearly as successful a question as “CSS color values HEX red” combined with “CSS background color.” I spent a lot of time learning to Google like a pro. I carefully learned the vocabulary of HTML so I knew what I was talking about when I asked the Internet for answers."
According to Khazan while it’s true that some types of code look a little like equations, you don’t really have to solve them, just know where they go and what they do. "In most cases you can see that the hard maths (the physical and geometry) is either done by a computer or has been done by someone else. While the calculations do happen and are essential to the successful running of the program, the programmer does not need to know how they are done."
Khazan says that in order to figure out what your program should say, you’re going to need some basic logic skills and you’ll need to be skilled at copying and pasting things from online repositories and tweaking them slightly. "But humanities majors, fresh off writing reams of term papers, are probably more talented at that than math majors are."
Original Submission
(Score: 5, Insightful) by morpheus on Thursday September 03 2015, @11:08AM
The two articles cited in the TFA display an amazing combination of arrogance and disrespect for professional programmers mixed in with a feeling of self-importance. Without having a clear idea of what either of the fields (mathematics and `coding') involves, both authors declare that one does not need one to succeed in the other. As a number of people pointed out, writing HTML and CSS (even Flash) is not very representative of what programmers do. I hear the same tale from engineers often: `I have never solved a differential equation in my life and I am an engineer ...'. True enough but the other side of this coin is that most of what those engineers do does not require an engineering degree either. Lets face it: most so called white collar jobs require very little education to perform and not much in the way of experience, either.
Mathematics (do not call it math, please) has become a scary word but it is an easy and straightforward subject at the undergraduate level as taught to most non-majors. The outright rejection of it as some esoteric knowledge devoid of any practical significance simply shows basic lack of culture and curiosity. The push in articles like these is to claim that one does not need any education or knowledge to do pretty much anything, all it takes is `lack of fear', `self-respect', and `determination'. If your goal is to make a website red, or fill out an OSHA report, this may be true but there are people out there who do difficult things that really matter and they deserve our respect. Those who would like to become one of those people also deserve to know that one is best served by ignoring the trash journalism and the mob opinions it promotes. Mathematics and programming are both very challenging when done at the right level and this is part of what makes them so attractive for some.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 03 2015, @11:55AM
Mathematics (do not call it math, please) has become a scary word but it is an easy and straightforward subject at the undergraduate level as taught to most non-majors.
The way most schools teach it makes it seem "easy" because what they teach is not truly mathematics, but rote memorization. Understanding things is clearly overrated, as the 'Google pro' in the article proves. But go to a top school and these losers would most likely be weeded out almost immediately.
(Score: 2) by fritsd on Friday September 04 2015, @02:26PM
I think you're completely correct.
I remember an anecdote from a maths student, decades ago, so maybe I remember it wrong.
Can you still do the long division [wikipedia.org] that you learned in primary school? Then read on & shiver..
He told me, that in the first month of the first year of undergraduate Mathematics study, their most important "stumbling block" lecture was something called "Introduction to Mathematics".
They had a lecture about long division, with examples.
The homework was, to *prove formally* why the algorithm always worked and terminated (for natural numbers, with a remainder, etc.).
Those students who couldn't do that by next week, were informed that they'd better switch studies to something easier, because they didn't "have what it takes" to continue their Mathematics study.
I would find that a very difficult homework assignment.