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Comment by code177 | Hacker News Reader

Simple answer - the vast majority programmers rarely see more than rudimentary math on most projects, unless those projects are specifically math orientated (actual sciences, for example).

The rest of us working on our sites, platforms, apps and what-have-you usually only see anything resembling math when dealing with things like UI and Interaction models, or typically soft-math areas like rating systems and segmentation.

Possibly inflammatory, but perhaps a better question would be: why do most programmers work so hard at pretending they're engineers?

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I've never regretted missing out on a formal CS education but I bump up against the limits of my math knowledge all the time. This wasn't the case when I was writing CRUD web apps, of course, but over the last year I've been working in DSP and machine learning and getting my head around the math has been much harder than the coding.

I think there's a certain stigma to the word 'programmer' kind of like 'code monkey.'

Most programmers know about SQL statements... But rarely identify it with set theory and that difference has a big impact on how you design and program databases. Being able to get by without that understanding is no excuse.

I think you can learn SQL as SQL, without math background. OTOH just knowing mathematical model of SQL is not enough to write good SQL.

SQL in practice is not a purely mathematical construct: you have to know how to make use of spinning platters, indices, caches, locks, network connections, intricacies of data types and bunch of quirks and bugs of the RDBMS.

I've learned SQL before learning set theory properly. It turned out that I did understand (SQL-related parts of) it, I just didn't know it was called set theory :)

why do most programmers work so hard at pretending they're engineers?

In my experience, this is a regional thing. For my first ten years in the industry (on the east coast), I never met another programmer who called herself an engineer. We were "analysts," "developers," or "programmers." Then I took a job with a local company with a tech office in SV, and everybody, including some of the testers, were "engineers" (hey, even I'm an engineer now!).

Perhaps we should consider that Programmers its a super class of Scientist, Engineer, Designer, Technician.

And that not everybody should know everything about the subclases.

If you think of yourself as developer(?), and Rick as a mathematician its fine!; the problem comes when Rick think you should behave as a mathematician because you are a programmer or viceversa.

The sort of maths the article is referring to has very little to do with arithmetic computation, and is present in the type systems of those languages you're developing sites and apps in.

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