416
submitted 1 day ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

Meme of two women fighting while a man smokes from a pipe in the background.

The women fighting are labeled "mathematicians defining pi" and "engineers just using 3 because it's within tolerance"

The man smoking is labeled "astrophysicists" and the pipe is labeled "pi = 1"

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[-] [email protected] 49 points 1 day ago

as an engineer, a lot of languages (even proprietary ones) have a built-in constant pi variable because it is so ubiquitous - its easier and more readable to use pi than 3........

[-] [email protected] 4 points 14 hours ago

I've also never seen a fellow engineer simplify pi to just 3, although I have seen a rise of memes from people who think they do.

I would slap someone if I saw them try that, it's unnecessarily sloppy. 3.14 is the default, and trivial to work with if you're using a calculator (I would also slap someone if I saw them not using a calculator). Unless you just LIKE having all your calculations be off by almost 5%. Then you'll come back wondering why so many of your parts are out of tolerance.

[-] [email protected] 14 points 21 hours ago

And then you’re using C++ and they scold you for including cmath for just M_PI because it increases compilation times.

[-] [email protected] 19 points 21 hours ago

We're talking about engineers here! We're using MATLAB or Python if we're programming at all.

[-] [email protected] 31 points 21 hours ago

Your not writing regular python code, your writing a special subset of python intended for engineers and scientists called "bad python code"

[-] [email protected] 1 points 8 hours ago* (last edited 8 hours ago)

Your not writing

Coder/engineer confirmed.

[-] [email protected] 6 points 16 hours ago* (last edited 16 hours ago)

My code is not intended to be run by any idiots but myself! Anyways why can't i make sense of what i have written just a month ago?

[-] [email protected] 4 points 17 hours ago

As a comp sci that interacts a lot with engineers, I feel this in my soul.

[-] [email protected] 5 points 20 hours ago

You can't say that for all engineers. I'm one and the biggest part of my job is programming in C++

[-] [email protected] 3 points 17 hours ago

Just wanted to say something similar. Any low latency high frequency code is written in c++, c or assembler. And that’s engineers work usually.

[-] [email protected] 4 points 14 hours ago
[-] [email protected] 1 points 9 hours ago

Still want to try rust but in my field it’s just not established enough unfortunately. But I love the idea of the language.

[-] [email protected] 1 points 9 hours ago

honestly, my rust comment was mostly a joke; rust is great for it, but its readability is really bad. i'm not a huge fan of writing/reading it, just using it.

[-] [email protected] 5 points 17 hours ago* (last edited 17 hours ago)

As they should, if that's the only thing you are using it for, don't introduce a whole header file, just put the following in the constants.h or equivalent that the proj for sure has:

#define M_PI   3.14159265358979323846264338327950288

Yes, it's literally what math.h has defined.

this post was submitted on 17 Jun 2025
416 points (97.5% liked)

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