Programming

17416 readers

86 users here now

Welcome to the main community in programming.dev! Feel free to post anything relating to programming here!

Cross posting is strongly encouraged in the instance. If you feel your post or another person's post makes sense in another community cross post into it.

Hope you enjoy the instance!

Rules

Follow the programming.dev instance rules
Keep content related to programming in some way
If you're posting long videos try to add in some form of tldr for those who don't want to watch videos

Wormhole

Follow the wormhole through a path of communities !webdev@programming.dev

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

snowe@programming.dev

Ategon@programming.dev

MaungaHikoi@lemmy.nz

118

How Good at Math Does a Programmer Need to Be? (sh.itjust.works)

submitted 1 week ago by anonymouse2@sh.itjust.works to c/programming@programming.dev

74 comments fedilink hide all child comments

I'm working my way to a CS degree and am currently slogging my way through an 8-week Trig course. I barely passed College Algebra and have another Algebra and two Calculus classes ahead of me.

How much of this will I need in a programming job? And, more importantly, if I suck at Math, should I just find another career path?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] kartoffelsaft@programming.dev 7 points 1 week ago (1 children)

While I do agree that math gets much easier with interest, and that it gets more interesting the further you get into it, and that math is inherently beautiful, etc. I feel this argument has to fall flat to people who don't already agree. It's the education equivalent of when someone says they couldn't get into an anime and then the fans tell them 'oh it gets really good around season 9'. You could be completely correct, as you are here, but it's utterly unconvincing if you don't already "know."

To be fair, I think this is mostly a problem with math curricula. Math classes up through high school and early college seem to focus on well trodden solutions to boring problems, and at some (far too late) point it flips around to being creative solutions to interesting problems. I think this could be fixed eventually, but such is the system we have now.

[–] UnfortunateShort@lemmy.world 2 points 1 week ago

I totally agree. I think maths should start with games in elementary and cover history and applications as soon as you enter middle school. (Keeping games of course, how is there no redstone in the maths curriculum?!)

And I know that my rambling won't convince people to immediately shake off the system induced maths fatigue, but I'll never stop encouraging people to give it a second chance :)