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> It's easier to think in programming than math. I think that it depends a lot on background. My suspicion is that it's not easy for a random, untrained perso
by JadeNB 3y ago
> It's easier to think in programming than math.
I think that it depends a lot on background.
My suspicion is that it's not easy for a random, untrained person to think in either. I think that a lot of folks here are programmers, trained (intentionally or just by experience) to think in programming terms, and so find that easier. I'm a mathematician by training, and so find it easier to think in that way—for example, I still sometimes find it hard to force myself to think about the fact that it might matter which of two computationally equivalent formulations of a problem one uses, just because one takes orders of magnitude longer than the other to execute.
- turtleyacht 3y agoHow do you know it's correct, though? Except to check the answers, or ready access to colleagues--but now a global network, and plenty of problems to review besides. There's no excuse anymore. I could even post questions myself, and find explanations enough. Leaning on the compiler and staring at a segfault would have been pretty discouraging before Java, for example. Folks who may have given up may have found Python learnable or more forgiving. Once past that initial hump, and writing loops, operations against a database, and we're off to the races. But there's plenty to practice in math, with textbooks even. Maybe we needed to learn to compute, do enough exercises calculating--the same as printf() and console.log()--to get the bits before proofs, before the higher-order ideas, could stick.