> If programming is not-math Programming is _always_ math; was it Dijkstra who said "programming is one of the hardest branches of applied mathematics"? It's a

> If programming is not-math Programming is _always_ math; was it Dijkstra who said "programming is one of the hardest branches of applied mathematics"? It's also engineering - as in "engineers have to do some math occasionally, even if they don't realize that". I often ask on the interviews to produce an expression returning sorted 3-element list using some simple primitives. I've found that with chosen primitives you still can model different approaches - and even though in all cases the result is an expression ("sorted list is..."), the structure of that expression can model imperative style ("first do this, then this...")