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"especially for a web developer" is the important part. As a fellow web developer, I agree. I'd certainly like to get into the mathier side of programming somed

"especially for a web developer" is the important part. As a fellow web developer, I agree. I'd certainly like to get into the mathier side of programming someday, but it's rarely necessary for my day-to-day operations. Remember, he's writing a letter to his former self, so the advice applies more to his life than it does in general.

shin_lao 17y ago
AFAIK web development uses SQL, SQL is relational algebra.
- dangrossman 17y ago
  No, DBAs tried to come up with a math-like name for writing queries so that they appear to have a more prestigious skillset than they really do. Any high school kid who's written "hello world" can get through databases 101, including expressing queries as relational algebra, in a week.
  - btilly 17y ago
    Try to debug performance problems in queries, or scalability problems across your whole database. Trust me, competence in math will quickly prove very useful. Of course if you are not competent in math you won't do well at that kind of task, and because you don't know better you won't necessarily recognize your inability for what it is.
loup-vaillant 17y ago
The amount of math which you need in programming may not enormous, but it is certainly not limited to boolean algebra, and it needs to be internalized. For instance, if you don't understand that a function is a mathematical object like any other, you won't understand some very useful things in day to day web programming: closures, lambda, `map`, `filter`… Without those, my web site generator[1] would have been much more complicated. [1]: http://www.loup-vaillant.fr/projects/ussm/ http://www.loup-vaillant.fr/projects/ussm/
- kls 17y ago
  Exactly you can do it without math, but elegance and performance are much easier with math on your side. The one I always find funny is the massive volumes of time money and energy spent "Load Testing" code, when some simple algebra and statistics can rapidly give you a projection of your scalability. Then you only have to run a test to validate you work. Yuo can test load without math but it sure saves a lot of time and money to do it with it. It is always people that don't understand math and its application that say oh, I don't need it for what I do "web development I am looking at you" and then wonder why their systems are, complex, ill performant, and inelegant. Please learn math before you say you don't need it. Or more specific to this article stating that programming is complex / hard and following that with you don't need math. It's only hard because you are not using math. I have done 3D simulation, AI, robotics, embedded and now web over the coarse of my career and the only complex systems that I have run into where designed without the assistance of mathmatics.

shin_lao 17y ago

AFAIK web development uses SQL, SQL is relational algebra.

dangrossman 17y ago
No, DBAs tried to come up with a math-like name for writing queries so that they appear to have a more prestigious skillset than they really do. Any high school kid who's written "hello world" can get through databases 101, including expressing queries as relational algebra, in a week.
- btilly 17y ago
  Try to debug performance problems in queries, or scalability problems across your whole database. Trust me, competence in math will quickly prove very useful. Of course if you are not competent in math you won't do well at that kind of task, and because you don't know better you won't necessarily recognize your inability for what it is.

loup-vaillant 17y ago

The amount of math which you need in programming may not enormous, but it is certainly not limited to boolean algebra, and it needs to be internalized. For instance, if you don't understand that a function is a mathematical object like any other, you won't understand some very useful things in day to day web programming: closures, lambda, `map`, `filter`… Without those, my web site generator[1] would have been much more complicated. [1]: http://www.loup-vaillant.fr/projects/ussm/ http://www.loup-vaillant.fr/projects/ussm/

kls 17y ago
Exactly you can do it without math, but elegance and performance are much easier with math on your side. The one I always find funny is the massive volumes of time money and energy spent "Load Testing" code, when some simple algebra and statistics can rapidly give you a projection of your scalability. Then you only have to run a test to validate you work. Yuo can test load without math but it sure saves a lot of time and money to do it with it. It is always people that don't understand math and its application that say oh, I don't need it for what I do "web development I am looking at you" and then wonder why their systems are, complex, ill performant, and inelegant. Please learn math before you say you don't need it. Or more specific to this article stating that programming is complex / hard and following that with you don't need math. It's only hard because you are not using math. I have done 3D simulation, AI, robotics, embedded and now web over the coarse of my career and the only complex systems that I have run into where designed without the assistance of mathmatics.