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> There's a far more people that know mathematical summation than know how to program Source? My experience is about 100 to 1 the opposite. I know tons of pro

> There's a far more people that know mathematical summation than know how to program Source? My experience is about 100 to 1 the opposite. I know tons of programmers that don't know math notation. I know few people at all, even non programmers, that know math notation. I know 8yrs old that code. They don't know any math.

thfuran 11y ago
Aren't summations taught in high school?
- Elrac 11y ago
  Yes, but I think they're the kind of knowledge you hold on to for the test and then, unless you become a mathematician, you avoid for the rest of your life. I understand "sigma notation" and related mathematical symbolism, and can work my way through understanding a formula if I really need to. But given a choice, I let my eyes glaze over and pretend I didn't see the formula. I'm one of those programmers, and I think typically so, who consider math a distant relative whom I give a friendly wave from a distance but not one I like to corner for an intense heart-to-heart.
  - kbenson 11y ago
    But you've seen it before, and if you saw it again and you didn't remember exactly what the symbol stood for, you would probably still remember it was math related, and be able to look it up fairly quickly. There's a whole class of domain symbols that fall into this category, and even for the people that don't know them immediately, if they look them up, they might find useful info that conveys some of the original developer's intent. For example, Δ, an searching for it will probably bring you to Wikipedia[1], where some common usages are easy to see (and "change" is the top one, which is what I would assume when seeing it). Increased symbolism front-loads learning to increase expressiveness later. If we've already front-loaded that learning to a small or large part on a large chunk of the population, that can greatly change the equation for how much it slows initial understanding of the code, and thus it's usefulness. As I mentioned elsewhere, we generally use '+' and '-' in programming languages because everyone already knows what they mean. We could just as easily use add(a,b) and subtract(a,b), and in some languages we do so, but in general there's so little friction in using the most basic math notation it's accepted without qualification as a better way to do it. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delta_(letter) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delta_(letter)
kbenson 11y ago
> Source? Every high school graduate that has had a trigonometry course, every college student that has taken any calculus. Tens of millions in the US alone. > I know 8yrs old that code. They don't know any math. Sure they do. They know + and -. We use those for the same reason. We could use add(3,4) but we don't (usually).

thfuran 11y ago

Aren't summations taught in high school?

Elrac 11y ago
Yes, but I think they're the kind of knowledge you hold on to for the test and then, unless you become a mathematician, you avoid for the rest of your life. I understand "sigma notation" and related mathematical symbolism, and can work my way through understanding a formula if I really need to. But given a choice, I let my eyes glaze over and pretend I didn't see the formula. I'm one of those programmers, and I think typically so, who consider math a distant relative whom I give a friendly wave from a distance but not one I like to corner for an intense heart-to-heart.
- kbenson 11y ago
  But you've seen it before, and if you saw it again and you didn't remember exactly what the symbol stood for, you would probably still remember it was math related, and be able to look it up fairly quickly. There's a whole class of domain symbols that fall into this category, and even for the people that don't know them immediately, if they look them up, they might find useful info that conveys some of the original developer's intent. For example, Δ, an searching for it will probably bring you to Wikipedia[1], where some common usages are easy to see (and "change" is the top one, which is what I would assume when seeing it). Increased symbolism front-loads learning to increase expressiveness later. If we've already front-loaded that learning to a small or large part on a large chunk of the population, that can greatly change the equation for how much it slows initial understanding of the code, and thus it's usefulness. As I mentioned elsewhere, we generally use '+' and '-' in programming languages because everyone already knows what they mean. We could just as easily use add(a,b) and subtract(a,b), and in some languages we do so, but in general there's so little friction in using the most basic math notation it's accepted without qualification as a better way to do it. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delta_(letter) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delta_(letter)

kbenson 11y ago

> Source? Every high school graduate that has had a trigonometry course, every college student that has taken any calculus. Tens of millions in the US alone. > I know 8yrs old that code. They don't know any math. Sure they do. They know + and -. We use those for the same reason. We could use add(3,4) but we don't (usually).