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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."
Ok, so you can do a lot of coding without knowing math. So what? If you want to do anything really sophisticated, like design games or do high performance computing or any non-superficial use of a computer, you have to know math.
Indeed. You can be a good programmer in most sub-fields without having a good grasp of multi-variate calculus, but you will never be a good programmer without at least some decent math skills.
You might do okay at coding web sites. But even then: if you don't understand how the encryption works, how do you know what method to use for encrypting the passwords on your website. Should you just take someone's word for it? (Answer: no. And yet that's how bcrypt became popular.)
But even then: if you don't understand how the encryption works, how do you know what method to use for encrypting the passwords on your website. Should you just take someone's word for it? (Answer: no. And yet that's how bcrypt became popular.)
As someone who works in the infosec industry, the fact this comment is rated +5 Informative fills me with panic. Yes, you should absolutely take someone else's word for it, specifically you should take NIST's word for it. Because unless you're one of a handful of the most knowledgeable people in the world, you don't know enough about cryptography to judge the merits of a cryptographic hash algorithm.