3 ms·
The average programmer could probably get by with high school maths and just enough college-level statistics to know the difference between mean, median, percen
by 0xDEF 4y ago
The average programmer could probably get by with high school maths and just enough college-level statistics to know the difference between mean, median, percentile, and standard deviation.
- Traubenfuchs 4y agoI'd argue the majority of programmers and software engineers don't need anything beyond being able to work with percentages. But I also argue that the majority of programmers and software engineers are not computer scientists and normally do not need or use much computer science knowledge. Computer scientists probably use math a lot.
- rented_mule 4y agoProbably not required, but understanding the concept of a statistical distribution has come in handy many times for me when trying to improve the latency of systems. If you are unaware of distributions, you might measure latency multiple times and then calculate something like a mean or median. When thinking in terms of distributions you are more likely to draw something like https://matthiaslee.com/content/images/2017/05/bimodal_dist.png https://matthiaslee.com/content/images/2017/05/bimodal_dist.... which contains much more information. That example tells you that you have at least two different kinds of latency. It could be 2 different use cases, 2 times of day, cache hit vs. cache miss, etc. It's enlightening to know that there are multiple factors and how much they differ!