Ask HN: How much math one needs to know to learn programming? I am learning Python, and I have no prior experience of any language. I am switching career. I want to know if math is required to learn programming for web dev. |
Ask HN: How much math one needs to know to learn programming? I am learning Python, and I have no prior experience of any language. I am switching career. I want to know if math is required to learn programming for web dev. |
Arithmetic
Basic algebra
Basic Boolean logic
That’s it. You’ll mostly be wrangling interfaces and/or api/DB plumbing. Making things testable and repeatable. Reliable. Etc.
In my experience most programmers are useless at maths. Mathematicians and programmers are mostly separate populations and it’s relatively rare to find a solid programmer that’s also a solid mathematician or vice versa: totally different set of aesthetic preferences.
Meanwhile you will find plenty of programmers that skim a book on graph theory and think they know something. Or mathematicians that write crap matlab code and say they can programme.
Therefore, knowing math will leave you endlessly frustrated, because the kinds of tasks you would like to do are exactly the kinds of tasks you shouldn't be doing.
It's just not a big issue in the life of a typical enterprise developer.
For web dev, statistics will help you spot A/B tests that are broken or meaningless. And set theory and combinatorics will help with database queries.
I know almost nothing, really. I stopped taking math classes around 16/17 years old, I just wasn't able to grasp it and gave up.
Double majored at Uni in CS & Geography which allowed me to pass over all the mathematical CS courses. If you can't substitute out the math heavy papers with papers from another course, over your whole `X` years studying, then you better upskill as best as you can or it will be tough going.
But here I am in a dev job, that I got because it's hard to find geographers who can code, with my biggest regret being that I did not get enough of a mathematical understanding earlier on. It is such a useful and universal skill, it is a pity not to be confident in applying it. But the best thing is that if you work with a solid team you will have people around you to fill in your weaknesses, and you can fill in theirs.
You can get by without it, if you find a niche you can specialize in where coders are hard to come by, but you will find yourself really needing it and having to pass work on to someone else or finding some library.
If you are going to a CS curriculum then I would advise learning up to Calc 1 pretty well before hand in order to be ready because I had to take all of calculus (1, 2, 3), linear algebra, and a few CS classes that involved math like (Discrete Mathematics, Theoretical CS, etc.). It wasn't fun because I am not strong in math but I got through them.
Most importantly, if math is not your strongest subject, don't be discouraged to still learn programming because I was in the same situation and now after going through a CS degree and working at a few companies, I can confidently tell you that everyday work will very rarely involve any math beyond basic arithmetic.
Set theory, graph theory, stats, discrete math and linear algebra all rear their heads in various fields, but you could go your entire web dev career without having to understand them.
You need some to learn computer science in any depth, though they can be learned togethe and quite a bit for some particular kinds of programming or application domains.