Tips for Starting Programming

jaeminyou · December 11, 2016

2 hours ago, Erik Sieghart said:

Nah, you don't need to be good at math to get a CS degree. Just good enough to pass calc. After that you can purge your brain of it and never worry about thinking about calculus again unless you're trying to do something math related. The areas that would require you to do math have generally already all been done for you, so you don't have to implement them yourself.

For instance, the fuzzywuzzy library for python for fuzzy searching. No Levin-whats-it-called knowledge required!

My degree is in software engineering, which is actually considered to be the tougher of two, and I've never seen math terribly applicable, let alone necessary.

Which programming language did you start off with?

Nuluvius · December 11, 2016

On 09/12/2016 at 1:04 PM, Clanscorpia said:

I should also mention you need very high math skills to complete comp science. If you cant do Calculus you're basically screwed.

12 hours ago, Erik Sieghart said:

Nah, you don't need to be good at math to get a CS degree.

I completely agree with @Erik Sieghart on this. The expectation that strong maths is a requirement is nothing more than a relic left over from the early days of the software industry. It's simply not true in relation to the state of current industry today.

Unfortunately it is still somewhat ingrained into the draconian education system; bare in mind that this is the same system that will invariably teach its syllabus using ageing languages such as Visual Basic or using current languages with terribly outdated or even poor coverage of principals and methodologies... It's somewhat of a sad story and something that we see parroted time and time again on here.

Again Erik made a great point in relation to this:

12 hours ago, Erik Sieghart said:

After that you can purge your brain of it and never worry about thinking about calculus again unless you're trying to do something math related. The areas that would require you to do math have generally already all been done for you, so you don't have to implement them yourself.

One just has to get through the system, the real world is a vastly different place. Of course one may well choose to specialise in this kind of field, there's always image processing or missile guidance systems for example.

Begin dyscalculate I had an awful time getting through the system. However since making it though I seldom encounter a problem and I have thus far had the pleasure to cover quite a wide and varied range of fields within the industry.

Do not let the fear of mathematics discourage you from pursuing your dreams.

vorticalbox · December 11, 2016

@Nuluvius off on a education rant I see one thing that I brought up to my college and university multiple times was the lack of real world technologies being used.

I is nice to have an understand of how a language works but no developer I'm their right mind would sit and hand code everything. That's why we created libraries.

I would add not using git to my list of things they should be teaching.