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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.
• derangedHorse 6y ago
  Calculus doesn't relate to the work of the programming majority. I've only seen it used for domain-specific work or in contrived examples (like LeetCode-esque problems).