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I'd add to that and say shorting is typically selling a share that you don't own. Which means you need to borrow it from a broker for a fee. There's a securities lending market which revolves around borrowing and lending shares for these reasons.

That was my first year text book in 1998. Sounds like it's still going strong!

Agreed, my experience programming has been similar. Simply put the hardest part of most big software projects is just building the right thing.

Yes, I was in first year in 1998 and only learnt to program then. My career has involved working as a programmer or in roles that required me to do significant amounts of programming.

I completely appreciate that. I was also attempting to tell regular excel users about the virtues of TDD! I had grander plans where I imagined creating centralised test suites that caught more generic issues and anybody in the bank could upload their spreadsheet for validation. It didn't quite get that far though.

I've built a unit testing framework for Excel using Python and the openpyxl library. I work in a bank and using Excel was unavoidable in some cases. You'd basically build a test suite for a spreadsheet in Python and run it like a regular test suite. It helped a lot in catching issues. Obviously it would be nicer if unit testing was built into Excel, but it is possible to build side tools around it.

If you did write a paper that assumed different axioms to the norm you would just state that you had done so! Because mathematics is axiomatic, mathematicians are happy to play around with axioms as long as it leads to something interesting.

I agree with that. I've been programming on and off in Python since 2008 and really like the language. I started using R just over a year ago after joining a new team. It took a while to adjust but I've gotten to prefer it for exploratory data analysis and data viz.

I found learning about the binomial model to be particularly good at establishing intuition about option pricing. Nowadays it's considered a toy model but it makes the ideas of a replicating portfolio and risk neutral probabilities very clear with nothing more than basic high school math.

Haskell course in 3rd year at university in the year 2000. It was only 5 weeks and I didn't fully appreciate it at the time. I did maths for a few years after that and only returned to programming later and rediscovered functional programming as it started becoming popular again. I haven't programmed in a functional language professionally but ideas from functional programming have changed the way I write code.

I listen to podcasts while doing domestic tasks!

If you enjoy podcasts this episode discusses ruff: https://talkpython.fm/episodes/show/400/ruff-the-fast-rust-b...

Given that in the UK a degree is 3 years and an MSc is typically 1 year, I would do an MSc. Delaying work by one year isn't much in the grander scheme of things. Once you've started working you'll find it hard to come back and do your MSc.

I would recommend doing it at another university though and make sure you find a program that interests you. This is so you can broaden your network and meet faculty and students at another place. I was advised to do this by one of my lecturers, I ignored the advice and stayed at the same university but in hindsight I can see I would have got a lot more out of my MSc if I had gone somewhere else.

I did an MSc (in mathematics though) and feel that it opened doors for me in my career. This may be less true for computer science though.

I was expecting you to say finance where Excel is abused in a similar fashion!

In my previous job I used a Python library called openpyxl to write a suite of unit tests for some unwieldy spreadsheets that our team owned.

The tests were run every time the sheets were updated so we had a form of test driven development when working with the sheets.

There was a long running project on the go to retire the spreadsheets and replace them with a proper application but that was a multiyear effort.

I second "Beautiful Code" it's a book I bought years ago but still browse through from time to time.

Yes, my younger sister plays wordle and we send each other our results. We normally exchange a few messages off the back of it while previously we communicated more sporadically. It's been a nice part of my daily routine, but I'm not sure if I'd play as regularly if it wasn't for that.

Not a book, but the podcast Without Fail discusses these sort of stories. It's by Alex Blumberg the same person who did the Start Up podcast.

@author - is there anything special about the way you visualize prime numbers? I'm wondering if there are indicators for you that a given number would be prime.

I normally ask candidates to produce a frequency count of the elements in a list. My ideal solution is that they use a dictionary to do it in O(n) time.

Dijkstra makes an interesting argument for 0 based indexing in EWD831.

https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD08xx/E...