3 ms·

when you remove all of the bullshit from programming, you just end up with math again.

• gord 16y ago
  yes, but that would not be enough to do something useful [yet, and less so with lisp] Theres lots of housekeeping [~bs] in programming, maybe some in math too.
• vog 16y ago
  Although computer science was formerly a part of mathematics, it has become a profession of its own right. Of course there are still strong connections on many levels. But there is a lot in mathematics which is (currently) completely uninteresting for computer science, and vice versa. In particular, there is part of computer science which has nothing to do with mathematics, and which a mathematician would always attribute to computer science rather than mathematics. And that part is call "programming". So I disagree. Sole programing without bullshit and without mathematics is still a profession of its own right.
• singular 16y ago
  I'm really not sure I agree; programming is necessarily an engineering discipline and by nature requires a far looser, fuzzier approach than maths; though there is of course a mathematical foundation to modern computers (the Turing Machine is named after a mathematician, after all), in general the highly formal essentially mathematical approach is something a programmer rarely has use for, though formal proofs of correctness are certainly useful in some areas of programming (and perhaps in the future will apply to far more.) Ultimately we program for people rather than machines, I hardly think you can describe readability, maintainability and elegance as bullshit. You can just as well program a correct algorithm with one-letter variable names and horrible nested gotos, but I'm sure the guy who has to maintain that will hardly describe the difficulties with understanding and maintaining the code as bullshit.