this post was submitted on 16 Jul 2023
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I remember how confused I was when I first encountered i=i+1... like, what ๐คจ? How can this be correct, this thing has to be wrong... and then you start seing the logic behind it and you're like "oooh, yeah, that seems to work... but still, this is wrong on almost every level in math"... and then you grow a bit older and realize that coding has nothing to do with math, instead it's got everything to do with problem solving. If you like to name your variables peach, grape, c*nt, you can, and if that helps you solve the problem, even better, just make it work, i.e. solve the problem ๐คท.
I mean, coding does have to do with math, it's usually just different notation. i = i + 1 in math notation is just i := i + 1.
That's advanced calculus, and my guess is, those notations were made up to give rise to a new field in math, which has more to do with computers than math, so I don't think that counts.
What discipline do you think Allan Turing and Von Neumann were in?
Computation theory, but that's not math as in regular math. It's just a fancy way of expressing how things inside a computer work, so we can actually make better versions of it. You just have to express it somehow in math terms.
It's like saying engineers use math all the time. No, they don't. We use simple aproximations of what is actually happening to dumb down the problem, cuz, it does the job nicely and no one will notice the difference between what we used, a simple aproximation, and the real thing, a full blown advanced calculus model of the thing we're working on.
You mean they were not mathematics department professors?
Where?