it seems to me that arrays, matrices, vectors and binary expression trees are very simple constructs that can be understood in a few hours by anyone with a high

it seems to me that arrays, matrices, vectors and binary expression trees are very simple constructs that can be understood in a few hours by anyone with a high school education. I have tried to understand some physics, I worked through "The Road to Reality" and I tried very hard to get my head around spin glasses for reasons that now are somewhat mysterious to me. My experience of doing this showed me that the maths employed by physics is at a whole other level from the maths of compsci; let alone programming. There is very rarely any need to do maths when programmming; unless you mean "counting". In fact I would contend that that mathifaction of programs is harmful (this is not the first time that this observation has been made). Programs have two functions; cause computers to do things, tell other programmers what the machine is to do and how it has been told to do it so that they can fix the f'ing thing and make it do other things as well without the f'ing thing blowing up all the f'ing time. Self taught programmers are often exceedingly good at the first bit and exceedingly bad at the second bit. This often changes as they get experienced, especially if they get landed with maintaining code that they have written and take that job seriously. The truism "the other person will be you in six months" really bites. Having said this the best programmer I know was a physicist, he was good when he interned for me, and is now a key contributor to a number of significant open source projects, producing lucid effective code.