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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: 2) by zugedneb on Thursday September 03 2015, @02:31PM
a lot of people think about themselves as programmers, but they are not.
they are configurors.
they configure packages an libraries of things to work.
Java is not programming in most cases, it is configuring.
thus:
programming =! configuring
old saying: "a troll is a window into the soul of humanity" + also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Ajax
(Score: 2) by tibman on Thursday September 03 2015, @04:02PM
That appears to be an assignment operation of the opposite of configuring. It reads like this: programming equals not configuring. Which would overwrite any value programming had because not configuring encompasses a lot of activities. I think you were wanting programming != configuring which is a comparison operation and not an assignment. Of course, you may have been writing in a weird language too.
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(Score: 2) by zugedneb on Thursday September 03 2015, @04:09PM
actually, I have so much stuff on my desk for the moment, that I have some problems reaching the keyboard, but thanks, bro... but, yeah, I know.
anyways, do you agree or not? that is the question.
old saying: "a troll is a window into the soul of humanity" + also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Ajax
(Score: 2) by tibman on Thursday September 03 2015, @04:54PM
Haha, yes, i agree for the most part : ) There seems to be some threshhold where configuring/coding becomes programming.
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(Score: 2) by meisterister on Thursday September 03 2015, @10:36PM
If you want this to be that broad, then why not say that programming in assembly language is also configuring? All you're doing is putting together a set of numbers (ie. configuration parameters) to make the hardware act a certain, predefined way.
(May or may not have been) Posted from my K6-2, Athlon XP, or Pentium I/II/III.
(Score: 2) by zugedneb on Friday September 04 2015, @03:29AM
I helped a dude with a small school project, to make a calculator.
He knew some algebra and .net, and should have used the string functions and gui functions to make a calculator in dotnet.
But I wanted to torment him, so I tricked him in to making a calculator with the gui buttons and display, but in the C way, implemented as a state machine with error handling...
to my delight, he was tormented by that :D
old saying: "a troll is a window into the soul of humanity" + also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Ajax
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 04 2015, @04:13AM
I would say programming is to configuring as is developing a circuit to soldering together a kit. Both are required to get the end result, and often doing the latter first is what gets people into doing the first.
I wouldn't use the term configuror, just programmer (techincian), and the developer is an engineer.