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Comment by 4ad | Hacker News Reader

> The less out-and-out math used to make a point about programming, the better, I think.

Imagine if an electrical engineer said this. Or an aerospace engineer. Or any real engineer.

I think in many cases it's "pseudomath": all the information is carried in the explanation, and the notation isn't doing any actual work, so you could drop the decorative notation and just leave the explanation in English.

Sure is a good thing I'm a software developer, not an engineer, then.

Those professions are going to be using calculus and trig and algebra.

Lambda calculus and number theory are significantly hairier.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, software engineering is not Real-Hard-True engineering, we get it.

With that out of the way, isn't it better if software development concepts can be explained with less math-heavy notation while keeping the math notation for the cases precision is needed?

I for sure remember a dwindling amount of the math from my statistics bachelor in my head after 15+ years. I'm able to recollect it after re-reading some material, things usually click back in place but I won't be doing that unless it's very necessary.

Don't reject the not real engineering folk. I'm fairly certain the only reason companies are so eager to label all software developers as engineers is because there are often loopholes in overtime laws specifically for engineers, with the logic that the engineer was in charge of the project and the schedule, and if there are problems, that's on them.

I've yet to see a software project where an software engineer was given much leeway in how a project was run, scoped, or where any of their concerns about the scope, schedule, or lack of an actual plan were taken seriously... I'll gladly trade being falsely labelled an engineer for overtime pay to cleanup the mess on schedule yet again.

(Most of) software engineering is not engineering, it's a trade.

So?

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