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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: 3, Insightful) by Rich on Thursday September 03 2015, @12:47PM
Don't complain about such people in the field. This attitude keeps us nerds well supplied with jobs. Eventually, the phone rings and some desperate project manager asks whether we are available, because "it just stops working once a week.". True, we don't get the more satisfying job to lay down a solid architecture from the start, but it pays the bills :)
The googling thing is just "the missing manual". I find that if I have to cater to Mac legacy stuff, I pull out my dead-tree Inside Mac I-VI, look it up, and find what I need. These books were very, very good; that style probably reached it's peak quality around the "New IM" series. With new stuff, the documentation has gone so far downhill (either by lacking, or by impractically wide scattering) that one becomes more or less dependent on stackoverflow. For the how-to-use snippet, and often, as important, for considerations that used to be in "Note: ..." or "Caution: ..." boxes in the books and that must be taken care of for a stable software.
As for hard math, it's really only needed once every couple of years, unless you do computational geometry, scientific stuff, or advanced algorithms. Much of todays internet-related work consists of stupid data shuffling (of which I somewhat think that if you have to do it, the architecture is wrong). What's important is a full understanding of the whole vertical application stack, from user actions to bits (that may or may not include math). If that understanding is lacking, eventually nerd work is generated. $ker-ching$