

Programming is not math - ahmadss
http://www.sarahmei.com/blog/2014/07/15/programming-is-not-math/

======
bediger4000
This is contrary to what most logicians think: "Programs are Proofs",
[http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/wadler/papers/frege/frege.pdf](http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/wadler/papers/frege/frege.pdf),
a paper by Phillip Wadler, seems to outline the case pretty conclusively.

Or maybe, as my 5th-grader says, "There's school math, and then there's fun
math". Programs are not arithmetic, that's true. I think Ms Mei's view of
"math" is impoverished, and this blog post is proof.

------
rizwan
100% agree with this. Anecdotally, I know a lot of people who would be great
at programming but they'd never consider it because of their pre-conceived
notion that they'd have to be good at math first.

I've never been particularly good at math, and learned enough to get by in my
CS theory classes. I hardly ever use math to program, unless the problem is
specifically math-based or geometry-based. To me, programming is communication
and organization.

------
thyrsus
For me, programming is math because nowhere else in my experience do I have
the degree of certainty that I have in programming. The article seems to think
that calculus is the archetype of mathematics, but integers are mathematical
objects as well. As natural numbers, 1+1=2 - always. Just like programming.
Except the natural numbers never fail due to a failed disk drive, power
supply, fan, electrostatic discharge, etc, HOWEVER, those externalities are
never a part of programming (just as sleep deprivation is never part of
mathematics) unless you're explicitly modelling failures, and in that case,
you're making a mathematical model of a system that includes failures. Outside
of programming and mathematics, entities and operations on them are usually
much less reliable.

When you program, you manipulate a mathematical object, not the physical
embodiment of that object. If you're dealing with the physical embodiment,
you're a chip designer. Even at the level of FPGAs, your dealing more with the
mathematical model of the device than with the details of the device itself.

------
davidy123
There are different types of programming, ranging from directly applied
theory, for example scientific modelling, to solving everyday problems, for
example creating an interface to a health system. In the best case
multidisciplinary teams will work together to solve problems to support many
perspectives. Pure math is sometimes necessary, but in many cases it's not,
and the projected requirement to be a math expert to participate in
formulating new digital connections is a very harmful force causing digital
illiteracy and wasted opportunities for participation.

------
seanflyon
Programming is to math as engineering is to physics

------
tabrischen
This is a useful article to show people who are deterred from learning
programming because they think they're bad at maths.

------
reverius42
False dichotomy. Math is a language, too.

