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I think that the total programming man hours spent on writing pure math computation would be dwarfed by the much larger number (I think) spent on doing menial c

I think that the total programming man hours spent on writing pure math computation would be dwarfed by the much larger number (I think) spent on doing menial computation: fetching data, transforming it and sending it forward/rendering some output. I suppose this article is targeted at that privileged former group.

mpweiher 7y ago
"One of the miseries of life is that everyone names everything a litte bit wrong, and so it makes everything a little harder to understand in the world than it would be if it were named differently. A computer does not primarily compute in the sense of doing arithmetic. Strange. Although they call them computers, that's not what they primarily do. They primarily are filing systems. People in the computer business say they're not really computers, they are "data handlers". All right. That's nice. Data handlers would have been a better name because it gives a better idea of the idea of a filing system." Richard Feynman https://youtu.be/EKWGGDXe5MA?t=278 https://youtu.be/EKWGGDXe5MA?t=278
0815test 7y ago
Just because some tasks are 'menial', doesn't mean they don't involve math at some level. You still want to get your data transforms right, and make sure that what you're fetching/sending over is what these other services expect.
- jhbadger 7y ago
  Indeed. Many people are turned off by reading Knuth because his "Art of Programming" deals with tasks, such as sorting, that are viewed as menial and (almost) never implemented by hand these days. But there was a lot of math involved in figuring out how to make such tasks as efficient as possible, as Knuth shows. Theoretical computer science is math (but then so is much of theoretical anything).
justinmeiners 7y ago
See my example. It was very short and helped me clarify immensely what I was going to write. You're right that if I am going to add another template to a Django site, there isn't much math to think about. But anything bigger than that, there are always questions worth considering.

mpweiher 7y ago

"One of the miseries of life is that everyone names everything a litte bit wrong, and so it makes everything a little harder to understand in the world than it would be if it were named differently. A computer does not primarily compute in the sense of doing arithmetic. Strange. Although they call them computers, that's not what they primarily do. They primarily are filing systems. People in the computer business say they're not really computers, they are "data handlers". All right. That's nice. Data handlers would have been a better name because it gives a better idea of the idea of a filing system." Richard Feynman https://youtu.be/EKWGGDXe5MA?t=278 https://youtu.be/EKWGGDXe5MA?t=278

0815test 7y ago

Just because some tasks are 'menial', doesn't mean they don't involve math at some level. You still want to get your data transforms right, and make sure that what you're fetching/sending over is what these other services expect.

jhbadger 7y ago
Indeed. Many people are turned off by reading Knuth because his "Art of Programming" deals with tasks, such as sorting, that are viewed as menial and (almost) never implemented by hand these days. But there was a lot of math involved in figuring out how to make such tasks as efficient as possible, as Knuth shows. Theoretical computer science is math (but then so is much of theoretical anything).

justinmeiners 7y ago

See my example. It was very short and helped me clarify immensely what I was going to write. You're right that if I am going to add another template to a Django site, there isn't much math to think about. But anything bigger than that, there are always questions worth considering.