Slashdot Mirror
You Don't Have To Be Good At Math To Learn To Code
HughPickens.com writes: 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."
These resumes from India all have 10 years of programming experience in html 5 and everyone of them have a degree in mathematics or cs! It is time Americans also had such backgrounds or we can't find enough qualified workers to do differential equations for Adobe Dreamweaver
http://saveie6.com/
She wants her web pages to be red. To her, this is "programming". What color does she want her database to be? Then she can be an SQL programmer!
Yet have spent most of my career as an embedded programmer. Arithmetic and basic algebra have done fine for me.
// Sorry, I'll write an apology and sin it
/// After I get my boss to cosine it
/ Only time I use my math degree is when I go off on a tangent
Let's say there wasn't yet a program to allow someone to create and edit and format documents containing words and pictures. (Arguably there still isn't a decent one in common use but that's another story.) Make such a program.
Or let's say there isn't an efficient and secure peer-to-peer data storage sharing framework, infrastructure, and application. Make me one of those, or, for extra credit, first design and implement a new programming language which will make it easier to build this encrypted, distributed storage layer app, the write the storage thing. Oh and please make it simple to use and extend, performant and highly scalable, multi-platform, and maintainable.
And I'd like it in red, by next Thursday?
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
Umm... I have a PhD in Applied Mathematics. I code like a drunken mentally ill person. The worst part is that I wrote a lot of code... *sighs* I redid a lot of code. I eventually hired professionals.
"So, David... What exactly do you mean with the "I'm Too Drunk" button nested in the menu under a mysterious label called "Hide and Seek?" She asks, with a determined look to see if I should be committed.
"Oh that? Yeah. For now it just closes the application. When I get a minute I'm going to tie it into the time clock to punch the user out and send a message to people physically close on the network to have them call a taxi - it will be at company cost." Was the only logical reply. Followed up with, "And this would be done if I had time to learn that API for the time clock."
"You're not serious, right?"
"Oh, but I am. Click the button and see."
Ah, little did she know... The button deleted random database assets. That will teach her to meddle.
Some of that narrative is fiction.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."