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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: 4, Interesting) by Phoenix666 on Thursday September 03 2015, @01:36PM
Because math instruction itself is so fucking awful. I didn't receive primary school instruction in other countries, only in America, so I can only speak to that. Even 35 years ago it was terribly rote, boring, and pointless. As a consequence I never really "got" math, in the sense that people in this discussion mean it. I soldiered on because I needed it in college coursework in economics, statistics, and social science, and occasionally in my career in tech, but it has been a keenly felt deficiency all my life; and it makes me sad because there are often moments when I feel I could have been brilliant in math, because I am really good at logic and abstract thought, but never can break through to "get" it because it's too late.
Now I'm seeing what's passing for math education in America now with my children, and I am truly alarmed. They get tested on proper use of math vocabulary, and how many math words they can use in a sentence. That's right, no math. They've turned math into English class. In other words the understanding of math in America is headed in an incredibly bad direction incredibly quickly, and the longer that continues the more difficult it becomes to turn around.
Against that reality, how can anyone be surprised that math phobia exists and is getting worse?
Washington DC delenda est.