we should stop saying you have to be good at math to program. yeah you use math but i say "good at" to talk about skills where ive achieved greater than average mastery or its a hobby, like im good at drawing or something. i avoided programming as a kid because i was a B student in math and considered "good at math" to mean gifted. how many potentially talented women programmers do we lose when they are ten years old because of this?
@Xibanya as an aside my 7th grade math teacher had a bunch of Apple IIs and I got super into programming them in basic. At the end of the year I asked about learning how to program modern computers and he told me that it was probably too complicated for me to do and I should look into it in college. While he gave me a great start, that was the single most harmful piece of advice I've ever received.
@Xibanya yeah this is the worst - *some* things like 3D graphics take knowledge of maths but the vast majority of things don't require any advanced stuff yet this myth persists 😕
@Xibanya Yeah totally agree. I think it's a universal issue regardless of demographic, it's crazy how intimidating it is to every layman, and unless you get shepherded into it young, or are exceptionally enthusiastic, the barrier for entry can easily be perceived disproportionately bigger than it is. And it's only until you actually do it enough you realize for the most part it's just a hyperbolic stereotype.
@Xibanya i'm a looser in advanced math. but. today i'm. celebrating my 4° programmer aniversary in PHP, Android and C#
if u want. u can!
@Xibanya I have a number based form of dyslexia, and can't do simple math in my head, and get so pissed when people say "but you a a programer". Yea I probably can't make a physics engine or come up with custom crypto but there are tons out there
@Xibanya Yep one can definitely learn programming even having only acquired basic math skills. Specific areas can require more and you can find applications everywhere, but the vast majority of working programmers survive on very basic math.
I think that's another important distinction to make as well: math isn't something you're born with but a skill that's accumulated over years of study, and if you're a little bit behind while in school that doesn't mean it's too late to learn.
@Xibanya When I hear the phrase “good at X” I never think they mean ‘gifted.’ I think they mean: “You need a decent grasp of X.”
Now, nobody's born knowing X (for any value of X), so if having to learn it puts anyone off, that's sad, but not a big loss, as they were not interested enough in the first place to make the effort.
That said, you really need to have a decent grasp of Math (Algebra, Calculus, Probability Theory, Number Theory...) in order to be a good programmer.
@josemanuel ill have to find a link but this is actually a legit difference between how men and women talk, at least where the study im thinking of was done (the usa)
@Xibanya What do women say when someone needs to have a particular skill in order to do something?
@josemanuel lol that you are well actuallying me on this. im in tech because i learned to say "fuck yea im fuckawesome at that," many women dont succeed because they will say "im good at" for "im an expert in"
@Xibanya I must admit I prefer the second set of people. They sound more professional.
@josemanuel thank you for your live demo of how women are disadvantaged in tech. delete youre account
@Xibanya @josemanuel it's purely a matter of marketing... Personally, I appreciate sincerity at most, and I don't like experts that just manage around... I don't sell myself as an expert if I'm not... "I'm good at" is a common phrase in my conversations... And I'm not a woman...
@Xibanya Could be that it's not about using the math itself, but that it requires a similar mindset? So that people who have an aptitude for math, would also succeed at programming? I don't know if this is true or not, but just a thought.
I do know based on my personal experience, that programming does require your brain to work in a particular way and that mine doesn't do that lol.
@cc its true that if you have an aptitude for problem-solving you will probably apply what you learned in math to programming as well but when you look at the gender gap and race gap in STEM it seems to start before puberty so something in the culture of how we raise children needs to change to address the problem, i theorize that the framing itself may be part of the issue
@Xibanya I definitely agree that they is are diversity and gender issues in STEM, but that may be separate, because as I stated, I am male and had a very "masculine" childhood and I still suck at programming lol.
I believe (based on non-scientific anecdotal observations) that everyone has different skills and abilities. As if it were genetic or based on brain chemistry. A person may be a genius in one field and useless in another (no matter how much they try to learn).
@Xibanya Programming is more akin to writing than math - many of the concepts implemented are math related, but programming itself is not math.
@DrChris yeah, i would say computer science is pretty math-heavy but programming != computer science.
@Xibanya I like this framing.
@Xibanya I'm (in my view) terrible at arithmetic and have had a bit of concern about that since elementary school. By university I realised I'm excellent at logical / discrete mathematics and algorithmics. If you'd told me I'd need to be good at math to study computer science, I might never have signed up. Luckily, I no one ever told me that 😊
(I'm sure there are others affected aside from women, but I get the cultural bias re math skill and boys)
@Xibanya I used to be bad at maths. And I work as programmer since 2 years ago (about 6 years programming just for fun). Deal with it.