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Comment by p0nce | Hacker News Reader

Programming education should have more humanities such as writing, sociology, epistemology and design, and not nearly as much maths.

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How much math is in a typical CS program these days? Calc 1-3 (maybe 3, varied by school), Linear Algebra, Statistics (inconsistent across programs), Discrete were pretty much it when I was in school 25+ years or so ago. That's only 4-6 courses depending on the university, though some where the CS dept was more strongly associated with an engineering college might have added Diff Eq and others. (I got interested in CS education and reviewed a lot of curricula in the US at the time, this is from memory.)

Some schools like MIT might have required more, but on average what I wrote was about it. Has it increased since then? Based on the new hires I've seen the last decade I'd have guessed the math requirements were mostly the same.

I'd argue none of that math is really necessary. While I have used most of my classes at least once, it was never a barrier to advancement in my career. Hell you could say the same thing about any of the theory. Like yea it's cool I know what a "merkle tree" is but it ultimately is a distraction from most of the skills you need to work with git.

Anyway, both computation and math are grouped under "apriori" knowledge. Any semantic distinction is ultimately silly. But we could just as easily be teaching programming as a craft in the context of the real world—I think this is closer to how it's done outside the US. I am not at all convinced the American style is what people ought to be paying for.

When I did my CS degree in New Zealand there were just two mandatory maths papers - statistics and discrete mathematics. Would be wrong to say I didn't get anything from them - but I'm not fumbling around truth tables or poisson distributions all that often either. Everything else was pretty standard: intro to programming, DSA, low level programming, compilers and networks. What I do find kind of mind blowing is comparing my lectures with the ones from MIT and CM (on YouTube) where they can't go more than a few seconds without jumping into math. Ultimately I'm left unconvinced I was deprived of anything important as a typical software engineer.

It was my grades in math that ultimately failed me out of my undergraduate CS program. My university had: Calculus 1, Calculus 2, Linear Algebra, Vector Geometry, Multi-Variable Calculus, Applied Combinatorics, Discrete Math, Differential Equations and maybe more that I don't remember. So many that CS majors could take one more math class and get a minor.

Yeah, I never thought this made sense, but so many people did; and, I always hear people on Slashdot talking about how programming IS math. None of that has been my personal experience, and I'm coming up on 21 years as software engineer. Discrete was the ONLY math course that I really enjoyed and did well in the first time around. For me, this always made sense.

25-year career as a programmer here.

I can count the times I've ever applied math past approximately high school algebra 1, on one hand. Period, in private life, in hobbies, at work. I'm not sure I've ever used any "college level" math, for anything at all.

I've, and other programmers I've known, gotten excited on the very few occasions anything even slightly mathematically-tricky came up, precisely because it almost never happens.

That program makes sense if you want to be a Computer Scientist, or study machine learning / AI.

You chose CS but really wanted Software Engineering. Discrete Mathematics was all you needed for that.

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