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You need all the math for the domain. If you are in engineering, games, DSP, ML, then that can be a lot. At the same time some developers can go a whole career

You need all the math for the domain. If you are in engineering, games, DSP, ML, then that can be a lot. At the same time some developers can go a whole career without ever (knowingly) using a floating point number. They work with web sites/services/databases/apis etc. But developers should at least know basic calculus, logic, and what what you need to grok basic algorithms and data structures. That part of math isn’t even meaningfully separated from “programming”. It’s one and the same. Programming is math. Math isn’t just a useful skill that some times pops up as useful. Without math, programming is merely typing. How much English do I need for writing?

throw6537 6y ago
Meh, disagree. A bunch of developers I know don't know the Pythagorean theorem but they are crazy good (developers). It completely depends on what your job requires you to do. For some developers to be great, they don't need even middle school math.
- alkonaut 6y ago
  I doubt Pythagoras would show up very often outside of domain problems, but basic logic and polynomials, logarithms etc shows up everywhere where you do algorithms and data structures. Math is a language and a developer will get a code review explaining something using that language (complexity etc). You can do without it but that doesn’t mean it’s a good idea not to simply know those things. It’s not years and years of math, it’s a tiny bit.
- MeinBlutIstBlau 6y ago
  I agree with this 100%. Hard math rarely has a use outside of it's scope. How often are you really trying to simplify the cotangent multiplied by an arcsin? Sure people who deal with trigonometry do often. But that subset of people is even smaller than people who do geometry. I'd wager carpenters do more math on a daily basis than the average programmer.
- contravariant 6y ago
  Not knowing some part of mathematics doesn't preclude them from doing something mathematical. The fact that middle school mathematics is often disconnected from what most people would find useful is a big problem.
MeinBlutIstBlau 6y ago
I still fail to see how calculus relates to programming for what most people do. Web or not.
- alkonaut 6y ago
  I mean things like knowing simple polynomials, which ties into things like asymptotic complexity. Which has the word “asymptotic” in it. That basic.
  - refactor_master 6y ago
    With that weak of a definition of math, you might as well say any first year high school subject is a prerequisite. If you didn’t pass any of those, chances are you’re not a great programmer either.
- sethammons 6y ago
  Simple example: monitoring your systems when data only increases, like number of hits to your site or queries to the db. That graph is always up and to the right. However, if you look at the rate of change (cough, derivative/calculus), the graph now tells you interesting things. Granted, the calculus understanding there is superficial, but it is there!
  - dlubarov 6y ago
    We can talk about those things without the language of calculus, though: "this graph shows requests per second, and that graph shows cumulative requests." And I think it should be clear how to derive one graph from the other, with or without calculus training. IMX numerical integration is useful in some areas (like physics simulations), but I haven't encountered any non-trivial applications of the kind of calculus that's taught in most schools, which focuses on continuous functions over the reals.
- contravariant 6y ago
  It crops up when you start to do statistics usually. That said programming itself is usually more about discrete things, so knowing about calculus is more helpful in figuring out what to use programming for than programming in general.
bmj 6y ago
How much English do I need for writing? That would depend on what sort of writer you were and what sort of ideas you are trying to share (and, I guess, your audience). Most famously, Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea is written in a such a way that an 12 year old could read it and understand the plot.
kayodelycaon 6y ago
Programming is nothing more than a list of instructions. Understanding data structures doesn’t require math, just logic. Maybe some mathematical operations can be derived from observation but the numbers behind it don’t really need to be known. I’ve never been able to grasp mathematics as numbers. My ability to work with numbers is severely compromised by my disability. This hasn’t hurt my ability to excel as a web developer. In fact, while I can’t visualize individual formulas or algorithms, I can visualize very complicated applications. And I likely know what types of algorithms and data structures would be likely be optimal. Even if I don’t know the “correct” math, I know where to look for it.
- Jtsummers 6y ago
  > Programming is nothing more than a list of instructions. That’s not true for every language paradigm.

throw6537 6y ago

Meh, disagree. A bunch of developers I know don't know the Pythagorean theorem but they are crazy good (developers). It completely depends on what your job requires you to do. For some developers to be great, they don't need even middle school math.

alkonaut 6y ago
I doubt Pythagoras would show up very often outside of domain problems, but basic logic and polynomials, logarithms etc shows up everywhere where you do algorithms and data structures. Math is a language and a developer will get a code review explaining something using that language (complexity etc). You can do without it but that doesn’t mean it’s a good idea not to simply know those things. It’s not years and years of math, it’s a tiny bit.
MeinBlutIstBlau 6y ago
I agree with this 100%. Hard math rarely has a use outside of it's scope. How often are you really trying to simplify the cotangent multiplied by an arcsin? Sure people who deal with trigonometry do often. But that subset of people is even smaller than people who do geometry. I'd wager carpenters do more math on a daily basis than the average programmer.
contravariant 6y ago
Not knowing some part of mathematics doesn't preclude them from doing something mathematical. The fact that middle school mathematics is often disconnected from what most people would find useful is a big problem.

MeinBlutIstBlau 6y ago

I still fail to see how calculus relates to programming for what most people do. Web or not.

alkonaut 6y ago
I mean things like knowing simple polynomials, which ties into things like asymptotic complexity. Which has the word “asymptotic” in it. That basic.
- refactor_master 6y ago
  With that weak of a definition of math, you might as well say any first year high school subject is a prerequisite. If you didn’t pass any of those, chances are you’re not a great programmer either.
sethammons 6y ago
Simple example: monitoring your systems when data only increases, like number of hits to your site or queries to the db. That graph is always up and to the right. However, if you look at the rate of change (cough, derivative/calculus), the graph now tells you interesting things. Granted, the calculus understanding there is superficial, but it is there!
- dlubarov 6y ago
  We can talk about those things without the language of calculus, though: "this graph shows requests per second, and that graph shows cumulative requests." And I think it should be clear how to derive one graph from the other, with or without calculus training. IMX numerical integration is useful in some areas (like physics simulations), but I haven't encountered any non-trivial applications of the kind of calculus that's taught in most schools, which focuses on continuous functions over the reals.
contravariant 6y ago
It crops up when you start to do statistics usually. That said programming itself is usually more about discrete things, so knowing about calculus is more helpful in figuring out what to use programming for than programming in general.

bmj 6y ago

How much English do I need for writing? That would depend on what sort of writer you were and what sort of ideas you are trying to share (and, I guess, your audience). Most famously, Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea is written in a such a way that an 12 year old could read it and understand the plot.

kayodelycaon 6y ago

Programming is nothing more than a list of instructions. Understanding data structures doesn’t require math, just logic. Maybe some mathematical operations can be derived from observation but the numbers behind it don’t really need to be known. I’ve never been able to grasp mathematics as numbers. My ability to work with numbers is severely compromised by my disability. This hasn’t hurt my ability to excel as a web developer. In fact, while I can’t visualize individual formulas or algorithms, I can visualize very complicated applications. And I likely know what types of algorithms and data structures would be likely be optimal. Even if I don’t know the “correct” math, I know where to look for it.

Jtsummers 6y ago
> Programming is nothing more than a list of instructions. That’s not true for every language paradigm.