Colleges are basically turning into poor imitations of vocational schools. The same is true for some universities. You get the worst of both worlds.
Indeed. I just didn't want to go too far off-topic on that particular hobby horse of mine.
Does this guy actually have evidence of anyone seriously making the point he is refuting ?
Kun is responding fairly explicitly to Sarah Mei's post Programming Is Not Math, as evidenced by the link in the third paragraph of his post, as well as the copious quotes that he reproduces and replies to. Having also taken the time to read Mei's post, it would appear that (a) Kun is not misrepresenting her point of view, and (b) she is sincere in her opinion. So yes, I would say that Kun has evidence that at least one person is seriously making the point that he is refuting.
Of course the reality is that you don't need any of those subjects. Those subjects can, however, be very useful to you as a programmer. So yes you can certainly be a programmer, and even a very successful and productive one without any knowledge of calculus, or graph theory say. On the other hand, there may well be times when graph theory, or calculus, or statistics could prove very useful. what it comes down to is whether you are inclined to think that way -- and if so it can be a benefit; if not it won't be the way you think about the problem anyway.
Which is almost exactly the point that the author of the linked article makes:
Not every programmer deals with these [mathematical] questions regularly (which is why I don’t think math is necessary to be a programmer), but if you want to be a great programmer you had better bet you’ll need it.
I think that we substantially agree. There are people that live in the city and need to get around within the city and there are people commute in. If one is going to completely eliminate downtown parking, then public transit needs to be good enough to provide for the people that live downtown. Personally, I would love it if transit were that good---I hate driving, especially in any traffic. However, I think that it is unrealistic to expect that public transit will ever be that good in all but a very few American cities (at least, not any time soon). In the meantime, if public transit is good enough to keep the tourists and commuters from gobbling up too much parking downtown, the problem is ameliorated to some degree.
In any event, thank you for the clarification and the lack of snark. It is unusual to meet rational people on the internet, and I apologize for whatever snark I may have snuck into my previous post.
The only people who think it is are ones who don't really understand CS (or computers) very well.
Including at least half of the sophomore level wannabe CS majors that show up in my calculus classes...
Two comments in reply:
(1) It is common for comments on articles about scientific results to include anecdotes of the form "The result is clearly wrong, because I experienced the exact opposite." This kind of response is so common, in fact, that the phrase "the plural of anecdote is not data" has become a shorthand way of noting that the anecdotal evidence of one person does not disprove a statistical aggregate based on a much larger set of data. Indeed, a quick search would make that clear. Even if it were the only thing that I had written, I would hope that the meaning would be clear from the large cultural context. As it is, I provided greater context with the second and third sentences of my post, which I would invite you to re-read before concluding that I don't know what the word "data" means.
(B) That being said, if you are going to be pedantic (as it seems you are insisting upon), the plural of "anecdote" is "anecdotes." The plural of "datum" is "data". From the point of view of a grammatical pedant, I am entirely correct.
I had it at 25. It wasn't that bad. Mild fever for about a day. Itched like hell though.
The plural of "anecdote" is "anecdotes," not "data." Yes, it is possible to be an adult, become infected with chicken pox, and not become terribly ill or suffer life-altering damage. However, the *probability* of suffering major complications as an adult is much, much greater.
If the aborigine drafted an IQ test, all of Western civilization would presumably flunk it. -- Stanley Garn