Comment by fusiongyro
13 years ago
It probably doesn't help that we go around parroting the ludicrous notion that you don't need math to program. It can hardly be true that you need to program to do math when we've been doing math for millenia.
How long can you mock your older brother in front of your hip young friends before he decides to ignore you and go play with his own friends somewhere else?
No one is saying that.
Levers. No one said the pulley (or CAD) rendered the architect defunct, and no one is saying computers should do the same for mathematicians. We're just trying to understand this resistance to using tools to help do heavy lifting, the “human-centric bigotry” as the article puts it. Reading some of the responses here, it's probably being overstated, but even so.
And ignore you and go play somewhere else? A good number of the most influential computer scientists have actually been psychologists, not mathematicians, so the older brother needs to get the fuck over himself if that's his attitude!
The problem is that these tools don't help much. In other fields, people clamor for software because software can excel at things humans are bad at: repetitive tasks, rote calculations, lots of arithmetic. The hard part of the proof is coming up with it, not checking it. And coming up with the proof requires deep insights, which means a library of proofs isn't as useful as a library of code where you can use the code without having to understand it. What we have so far is pretty good at checking proofs but very bad at coming up with them. So what you're actually engaging in here is "machine-centric bigotry"--the idea that the machine is intrinsically better at all problem solving than man, despite evidence to the contrary.
I'd like to hear who you consider influential computer scientists coming from psychology. The ones I hold dear are mostly settlers from math.
If the younger brother were as wise as he thinks he is, he wouldn't need to get so worked up as to substitute profanity for an articulate argument.
The last part was a joke, calm down dear.
Edit: As for psychologists, you're seriously telling me you never heard of Licklider? That's... astounding.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._C._R._Licklider
It's got nothing to do with need. It's whether it would be useful or not.
Consider programming. You don't need anything more than punch-cards to program. You don't need anything more than assembler. But higher-level languages can be useful, because they can make the task easier, give you greater leverage.
>>It probably doesn't help that we go around parroting the ludicrous notion that you don't need math to program.
I thought the consensus was that it really depends on the type of problems one is trying to solve, and that most programmers can in fact get away with knowing little math.
Just because something is a consensus doesn't make it true. And its not a consensus, its just the majority view that a minority of us find incredibly backwards. Just because you can get away with something doesn't mean its a good idea either. You can get away with a lot in programming, back yourself into a corner, and hack your way out, does that mean since you can get away with it that its a good idea to program like that?