I see that the blogger whose post is kindly submitted here led off by noting the importance of clear written communication, and I fully agree. The thrust of the

I see that the blogger whose post is kindly submitted here led off by noting the importance of clear written communication, and I fully agree. The thrust of the post here, that much of what is taught in the standard school curriculum in mathematics is neither strictly necessary nor especially helpful for becoming a developer, is also a good point. That agrees with Andrew Lih's response to the annual Edge.org question this year,[1] in which Lih suggests retiring calculus as a barrier to entry (a "hazing ritual") to careers in programming and coding. Overall, the blog author is correct that development of good written communication skills is central issue for most software development today: "A very smart person doesn't need to write any comments, the code is obvious to them!" On the other hand, as another several comments here have pointed out, learning more mathematics often allows insight into programming problems that completely escapes people who haven't learned the same mathematics. So it's not a bad idea to practice written communication on the job in part by commenting code so that colleagues see what mathematical approaches were built into the code. [1] http://www.edge.org/response-detail/25521 http://www.edge.org/response-detail/25521