Drinkable Chicken

Looking at the comments on my previous post and the subsequent Reddit thread, it seems that many implicit assumptions are made, some of them dubious at best. Without going into all of them, I will say this:

• It's possible to know areas of math relevant to computer science, and to dislike mathematical formulas at the same time. It's quite reasonable to be unfamiliar with areas that you don't encounter in everyday programming.
• Computer science may be mostly math, but computer science != programming. It plays an important role, but in most programming jobs, most CS concepts are rarely touched upon.

There's also a more dangerous set of assumptions shining through the whole discussion. It comes down to this: "Programming is computer science. Computer science is math. The more advanced math you know, the better a programmer you are. If you cannot do something rudimentary like reading a mathematical formula, then you don't know math, and therefore you cannot be a competent programmer."

If you want to believe that (or a variant thereof), be my guest, but it's simply not true. Unless you redefine "programming" to mean "100% computer science", rather than all that messy stuff that people do in the real world. You know, with GUIs, web apps, databases, SQL, dynamic languages, design, unit testing, refactoring, ...? Oh wait, you probably *don't* know. My bad. :-)