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Mathematicians and software (lemmy.world)

submitted 11 months ago by 3h5Hne7t1K@lemmy.world to c/programming@programming.dev

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It is often echoed that mathematicians make excellent software engineers, and that their logic-adjacent work will translate efficiently into coding and designing.

I have found this to be almost universally untrue. I might even say the inverse is true.

While I and many of my peers have capacity to navigate the mathematical world, it certainly is not what sets us (at least me) apart when designing clever algorithms and software tricks.

Point being: I dont think the property/trait that makes good programmers is mathematical literacy.

I would love to hear what others experience is regarding this.

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[–] Phoenix3875@lemmy.world 9 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

To be good at programming, a lot of knowledge is needed, but "accidental". From practical ones like how to use git, to conceptual ones like cache performance mental model. It's perfectly possible that git is designed with a different CLI, or the common cache line size being 512 bytes. Mathematicians usually don't care about these things, since they are accidental. So they are bad at writing programs that's far away from math.

It's a completely different story when they are writing programs about math. If the tool is good enough, i.e. allowing them to express math ideas in familiar terms, mathematicians are very good at writing math programs. As can be observed in Lean and mathlib.