Programming

17547 readers

101 users here now

Welcome to the main community in programming.dev! Feel free to post anything relating to programming here!

Cross posting is strongly encouraged in the instance. If you feel your post or another person's post makes sense in another community cross post into it.

Hope you enjoy the instance!

Rules

Follow the programming.dev instance rules
Keep content related to programming in some way
If you're posting long videos try to add in some form of tldr for those who don't want to watch videos

Wormhole

Follow the wormhole through a path of communities [email protected]

founded 2 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

Math and computation algorithms: why are they needed in programming? (lemy.lol)

submitted 3 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

11 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Sorry, the question in title sounds naive. I have no doubt that math is essential in programming, but I am thinking about philosophy of programming and want to summarize when they're needed in programming. My attempt is below:

Most applications of programming are making electronics do things through their interfaces. Whether that's telling a screen to display something, a network wire to transport data, a hard disk to persist data.

But we often need math because we often transform data, or we might make said electronics do things based on user input, or an event. Transforming an event to data is a mathematical construction.

Some applications are almost purely mathematical, like banking, crypto currency, or encryption.

In your opinion, does this fully explain why we need math in programming? Is there a better way to sum it up?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago

we need math in programming because math is the best language for describing the universe…
you don’t really need much to do a lot of stuff, but it’s a very math like thing… the computer was invented as a general purpose math machine, programming languages are rather similar to math… variables, functions, etc….
imo they make students take way too much math and it ends up being “just prove that you could do this, not that you’ll need to”.
like, “multivariable calculus with analytic geometry” isn’t needed for anything unless you’re doing scientific work….