In the past 7–8 years I’ve come around to the realisation that programming truly is a branch of mathematics, in a deep sense—and a strange one at that. It makes

In the past 7–8 years I’ve come around to the realisation that programming truly is a branch of mathematics, in a deep sense—and a strange one at that. It makes sense that they would share a lot of lessons. In my experience, those who say programming isn’t mathematics are usually mistaken about what math actually is. Or at least I know I was. I used to think math was about calculation, because that’s most of what I was exposed to in school—virtually every problem, even in higher-level mathematics, was brought back around to work with concrete values, perhaps in an effort to tie the problems to something “real-world” and get kids interested in it. But it had the opposite effect on me—that’s like saying programming is about making a machine do calculations! Yes, in a literal sense, but there are much higher-level, more abstract and interesting things at work there. To me, a computer’s value is that it’s an automated proving machine. You can make useful, entertaining, or interesting things happen in the real world—just by writing a proof that you can!