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Comment by ColinWright | Hacker News Reader

Fantastic - thank you. Interesting discussions, and I hope people take the time to read the article, threads, refutation, and other comments.

I look forward to any additional comments and contributions people may choose to make here.

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Something that was posted on HN once or twice before was EWD 1036: "On the cruelty of really teaching computer science", by Dijkstra.

It makes, in my opinion, a much more lucid argument than this article as to why a firm background in math, particularly theoretical math, is important for programmers of all sorts. It's definitely something I'd read if you're thinking about the role of math in computer science and programming as fields.

The article is here: http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD10xx/EW...

There have been numerous submissions of it to HN, of varying popularity. The ones I could find with the most comments are: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6838434 (three weeks ago) http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3553983 (one year ago) http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1666445 (three years ago)

Colin, I'm curious about your take on the essay. I have to admit that while I did read it, I did not engage with it deeply because I felt that the author created strawman views, particularly with regards to the people mentioned and the "Lisp school of programming." Since I found the premises so confused, I didn't have the energy to disentangle the real point from them.

(Part of my curiosity on your take comes from the fact that you commented on a similarly themed essay I wrote some time back.)

I've put it on my list of things to write about. It's a long list, but I hope to knock a few things off it over the holiday. Thanks for asking - I'll post here if/when I get something done.

Looks like you re-posted your own old submission. Nothing wrong with it I guess since people are still interested judging from upvotes. But that would be one of the reasons "the quality of HN threads is going down" as many complain. Some older users don't even want to comment anymore, since it's all the same thing re-posted all over again. Well that and bitcoin/NSA "news".

Threads like this are not the problem.

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