This corroborates my long-term suspicion -- all those talk about provably correctness of programs is basically a way to gate keep people from entering the industry.
I mean, of the millions(?) of programmers out there churning out code, how many % of them actually prove their programs correct?
Despite what all the academia-types say, I firmly believe that programming is at most 50% math/logic, and the other 50% is literature or "writing skills". The ability to express ideas in text form that is easy for people to read and understand is one of the most crucial skills to have as a coder.
The point is, this aspect of programming is so neglected that people readily accept gatekeeping of aspiring programmers by scaring them away with advanced maths, but nobody ever told you that if your writing skills suck (even in English or your native language), you might end up a bad programmer...
"50% math/logic" can account for a lot of proving correctness. And it's not even hard, even writing your programs in a modern type-safe language will put you way ahead of the pack.
I'm not saying the math is insignificant. It's just that, if you agree in principle that a significant part of coding is making the code legible to other people, the question still remains -- why is math usually a required part of a CS degree, but you never hear CS degrees require training of technical(?) writing skills?
I mean, of the millions(?) of programmers out there churning out code, how many % of them actually prove their programs correct?
Despite what all the academia-types say, I firmly believe that programming is at most 50% math/logic, and the other 50% is literature or "writing skills". The ability to express ideas in text form that is easy for people to read and understand is one of the most crucial skills to have as a coder.
The point is, this aspect of programming is so neglected that people readily accept gatekeeping of aspiring programmers by scaring them away with advanced maths, but nobody ever told you that if your writing skills suck (even in English or your native language), you might end up a bad programmer...