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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."
...when you need to google the hex representation of 'red'. *much* better to understand the encoding, and it certainly isn't hard or requires tricky math. it's literally RRGGBB
you are completely and utterly missing the point, by a long, long margin, and have made a severe judgement error. the assumption that you have made is to correlate "understanding" with "successful results".
believe it or not, the two are *not* causally linked. for a successful counter-example, you need only look at genetic algorithms and at evolution itself.
did you know that human DNA contains a representation of micro-code, as well as a factory which can execute assembly-level-like "instructions"? i'm not talking about CGAT, i'm talking about a level above that. to ask how on earth did such a thing "evolve" is entirely missing the point. it did, it has, it works, and who cares? it's clearly working, otherwise we would not be here - on this site - to be able to say "what a complete load of tosh i am writing"!
what this person has done is to use their creative intelligence as well as something called "inference". they've *inferred* that if enough google queries of "what is hex HTML for red" come up with a particular number and it's always the same number in each result, then surprise-surprise it's pretty much 100% likely that that's the correct answer.
*later on* they might go "hmmm, that's interesting, when i search for "red" it comes up with FFnnnn, when i search for "green" it comes up with nnFFnn" and then they might actually gain the understanding that you INCORRECTLY believe is NECESSARY to achieve successful results.
but please for goodness sake don't make the mistake of assuming that understanding is *required* to achieve successful results: it most certainly is not.