<story><title>Programming is hard</title><url>http://writing.bryanwoods4e.com/1-poor-poor-child</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>raganwald</author><text>For some odd reason, whenever you ask whether math is important to programming, there is a strong correlation between the depth of a programmer&apos;s mathematical training and his belief in its importance.&lt;p&gt;There can be many explanations for this, but the simplest is that when you have a tool in your tool chest, you tend to use it, and when you use a tool, you see opportunities to use it everywhere. Whereas if you don&apos;t have a tool, you don&apos;t see the opportunities it affords, so you don&apos;t know what you&apos;re missing.&lt;p&gt;Even if my conjecture is true, this doesn&apos;t mean that mathematics is more important than some other experience a programmer might bring to their career, so I am not suggesting that the author is wrong when suggesting it isn&apos;t important. Perhaps it&apos;s useful but less important than some other skills.&lt;p&gt;I&apos;m not a mathematician, so I don&apos;t know, it&apos;s all blub to me.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Someone</author><text>There also is a huge difference between the two groups with respect to what they think math actually is. Many lay persons do not know that logic and discrete mathematics are math.&lt;p&gt;The moment you reason about the control flow in your program, or even when you figure out that a for i=1 to 10 loop will terminate, you are doing math.&lt;p&gt;If the problems aren&apos;t hard, the math isn&apos;t hard, and you can even get away with some trial and error math (aka debugging). However, for harder problems such as a file system&apos;s source code, an encryption library, or a multi-threaded program, tweaking the code until it &apos;seems to be robust&apos; is not the way to go. For those, you need good maths skills.</text></comment>
<story><title>Programming is hard</title><url>http://writing.bryanwoods4e.com/1-poor-poor-child</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>raganwald</author><text>For some odd reason, whenever you ask whether math is important to programming, there is a strong correlation between the depth of a programmer&apos;s mathematical training and his belief in its importance.&lt;p&gt;There can be many explanations for this, but the simplest is that when you have a tool in your tool chest, you tend to use it, and when you use a tool, you see opportunities to use it everywhere. Whereas if you don&apos;t have a tool, you don&apos;t see the opportunities it affords, so you don&apos;t know what you&apos;re missing.&lt;p&gt;Even if my conjecture is true, this doesn&apos;t mean that mathematics is more important than some other experience a programmer might bring to their career, so I am not suggesting that the author is wrong when suggesting it isn&apos;t important. Perhaps it&apos;s useful but less important than some other skills.&lt;p&gt;I&apos;m not a mathematician, so I don&apos;t know, it&apos;s all blub to me.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>cynicalkane</author><text>Math--the fun kind, at least--consists entirely of thinking about abstract logical objects. A lot of programming is also this. They usually don&apos;t line up, except in cases like Haskell&apos;s type system, but the brainpower you develop in one is useful for the other.</text></comment>