6
goodJVM
6y

any mathematician turned devs here?

I think developers with a formal mathematical education should be the ones actually developing softwares. Ordinary developers are just good cooks who know to prepare these recipes by knowing to mix and manage the Ingredients through their experience, developing software using various libraries and frameworks, I don't understand what innovation we devs do in it, makes me feel less passionate about my work sometimes.

(I embrace the fact that being a developer requires an arstisic craftsmanship to do it properly)

Comments
  • 3
    What? Half the CS curriculum is hardcore math.
  • 1
    @Fast-Nop yeah but does it deliver us the core essence of mathematics? In which we actually identify a problem and convert it into a math problem and apply suitable math (calculus, queueing, or whatever). I don't know about the teaching methods in other countries but in my country we are just expected to solve math problems by remembering the formulas, not getting the intuition in most of the time.

    for example, I once went through a code base of a QRcode parsing library, in it I could just recognise the names of some (remembering from my math course as part of CS edu) mathematics concepts like Matrix, Eigen values, etc but I couldn't comprehend any of it.
  • 6
    @goodJVM that's not math as it's tought for CS over here. CS math involves a lot of actual math, i.e. proofs and stuff.

    However, math is mostly useful for software that computes something. Statistics, numerics, video / image / audio processing, 3D graphics.

    A lot of software, however, is not about computing, but about behaviour, and that boils down to managing state.
  • 8
    My humble opinion: I think a developer is, mainly, a problem solver that uses IT tools for it. You need maths as a developer, but you don't need a Phd, nor a designer needs a PhD in Arts.

    But as it was said before, half of a CS degree is pure maths. That's enough maths todo develop most of programs in this world.

    We use maths simply as it is, a language so we can use abstraction to better solve problems.

    About frameworks...specially with JS there is a ton of them, but that's a topic for another rant...what I want to say is that having some frameworks, libraries, API's, interfaces/classes and so on it's ok, we should not reinvent the wheel again and again.

    I think, if we are talking about developing programs/apps, know how to refactor is more important than maths.
  • 1
    @Fast-Nop I wish my CS math had proof and stuff included. Yup, only some computational softwares as you mentioned require complex math in it.
  • 3
    Mathmatics is very useful if you want to develop algorithms or realistic games. However I don't think you need it that much as a regular software developer. I only have a basic understanding of math and actually only had one math subject and three subjects on algorithms when I was getting my bsc, which was only since I did a minor with a gaming component.
    I do not miss any mathmatical skills during my daily work though, since it often just comes down to building a self service portal of some sorts.
  • 3
    "should be the ones developing software" - so I'm not allowed to be a fucking programmer without doing 5 years of boring maths?
    fuck you too
  • 2
    Thank god I'm a software engineer and not just a developer :/
  • 3
    until you realize that they been in academia so long that they overcomplicate and dont give you what you asked for

    edit : maybe not all math majors are like this, but I get that vibe
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