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Math Skills For Programmers — Necessary Or Not?

Posted by samzenpus on from the who-needs-theory-when-you-have-practice dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Currently, the nature of most programming work is such that you don't really need math skills to get by or even to do well; after all, linear algebra is no help when building database-driven websites. However, Skorks contends that if you want to do truly interesting work in the software development field, math skills are essential, and furthermore will become increasingly important as we are forced to work with ever larger data sets (making math-intensive algorithm analysis skills a priority)."

2 of 609 comments (clear)

  1. Anecdotally... by adolf · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    I have no more than basic math skills. I don't do much programming, aside from the occasional butchered-together script. I can grok SQL, parse C, and write some shell script and Perl, but only infrequently do I find a need to.

    But then, I only know what my job needs me to know, and that changes daily. I don't consider myself a programmer, but those around me in life seem to disagree.

    That being whatever it is: Discuss.

    --
    Kid-proof tablet..
  2. Re:Maybe it's cart horse... by bsDaemon · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    Having a large toolbox has worked quite well in my career.

    that's what she said