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To: justlurking

“Computer programming and architecture doesn’t require advanced mathematics, either.”

Seriously? If you can’t do an integral I don’t want you anywhere near my blueprints or code.


13 posted on 06/30/2016 3:15:06 PM PDT by TalonDJ
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To: TalonDJ
Seriously? If you can’t do an integral I don’t want you anywhere near my blueprints or code.

I did OS development for two decades. Never once did I have to "do an integral". However, I did mentor and teach people with liberal arts degrees like sociology to become productive developers, because they could do what I described: decompose a problem into manageable steps and implement it.

System programming is almost entirely boolean and integer math. The only time I did anything close to floating point math was when I was working on the floating point exception code for a processor that couldn't handle it on its own.

These days, the vast majority of applications are manipulation of strings. If there's any math at all, it's integers, dollars/cents, or percentages. And, there are open-source libraries that can do just about any number-crunching you might need.

I left out the word "system" from "computer system architecture", so perhaps you misunderstood that. I'm not talking about the design of actual hardware. There's little call for that, as commodity hardware can do almost anything other than very specialized tasks. Today, computer system architecture design is little more than putting together existing components and/or linking them together in a network. The architect spends his/her time specifying these components to meet the requirement(s).

And that's where I spent the last two decades of my career, analyzing these systems and pointing out where they neglected to consider how the design or implementation constrained the performance of the entire system.

19 posted on 06/30/2016 3:49:42 PM PDT by justlurking
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To: TalonDJ

Then you’re missing out on a lot of talent. You do not need extensive math skills to handle the overwhelming majority of software challenges.


30 posted on 06/30/2016 5:48:12 PM PDT by fuzzylogic (welfare state = sharing consequences of poor moral choices among everybody)
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