Why Programmers Need To Learn Statistics

David Gerard writes "Zed Shaw writes an impassioned plea to programmers: Programmers Need To Learn Statistics Or I Will Kill Them All. Quoting: 'I go insane when I hear programmers talking about statistics like they know s*** when it's clearly obvious they do not. I've been studying it for years and years and still don't think I know anything. ... I have taken a bunch of math classes, studied statistics in grad school, learned the R language, and read tons of books on the subject. Despite all of this I'm not at all confident in my understanding of such a vast topic. What I can do is apply the techniques to common problems I encounter at work. My favorite problem to attack with the statistics wolverine is performance measurement and tuning. All of this leads to a curse since none of my colleagues have any clue about what they don't understand. I'll propose a measurement technique and they'll scoff at it. I try to show them how to properly graph a run chart and they're indignant. I question their metrics and they try to back it up with lame attempts at statistical reasoning. I really can't blame them since they were probably told in college that logic and reason are superior to evidence and observation.'"

Comments

Percent probability that Zed Shaw is a jerk

[Anonymous Coward]

110%.

correlation != causation

[Hognoxious]

Correlation != causation. Just repeat that and you don't need to know statistics.

Title fail.

[girlintraining]

Programmers Need To Learn Statistics Or I Will Kill Them All

Okay, two things: First, threatening programmers never work. Management's been trying that for years. Second -- don't you mean 'kill -9' them all, or maybe demalloc(), or cast them to void*, or one of a dozen other witty things you could do besides the mundane answer of threatening stabby bits on them because you have a case of intellectual snobbery?

Re:Title fail.

[Anonymous Coward]

or firefox's implementation:

void demalloc(*ptr)
{
/* noop */
return;
}

Re:Your argument is dead, Zed

[Hurricane78]

I just found a very old hard disk. Double height. MFM/RLL. And after a “strings -n 32 /dev/hdd”, I got the following old saying, carved in the bytes of the disk:

Computer science
Statistics
Social skills

Choose one.

;)