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Christopher.Strolia-Davis@wpafb.af.mil (Strolia-Davis Christopher Contr
MSG/MAT) writes:
>To add a bit to this conversation, I would like to say that when I went
>into programming in the first place, I did not have a high school math
>equivalent knowledge(I was 12 when I started ok). So it is clear to me
>that it is not necessary to have high math skills to be a programmer.
In looking over the books O'Reilly has published, it seems pretty clear
to me that the vast majority of them are not on topics that require
highly honed math skills.
Lots of computing today is about collecting, storing, and presenting
information. Analyzing that information - while crucial, no question -
is something that happens only occasionally, and is often done
simplistically, to put it politely.
Analysis beyond simple stats is often left to specialized modules and
software, though it is definitely where a lot of the interesting work
takes place. Data modeling certainly interacts with analysis, and I
suspect a lot of analysts are frustrated by the naive data models they
have to deal with, but that's kind of the boundary for most people
developing XML vocabularies (or relational database structures).
RELAX NG and regular expressions are especially interesting to me with
regard to their use of math. While I don't claim that the math behind
either of them makes deep sense to me, they manage to produce systems
which can be learned and used effectively without a deep appreciation
for the underlying math.
Some programmers definitely need to understand math very well. The vast
majority, in my experience, do not.
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