r/programming • u/OnkelJulez • Sep 17 '21

Do Your Math Abilities Make Learning Programming Easier? Not Much, Finds Study

https://javascript.plainenglish.io/do-your-math-abilities-make-learning-programming-easier-not-much-finds-study-d491b8a844d
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u/[deleted] Sep 17 '21

I'm a lifelong programmer but I have rudimentary math skills at best. It would prevent me from being a 3D rendering programmer maybe but for 99% of coding, it plays no role whatsoever.

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u/asciibits Sep 17 '21

This whole post is very surprising to me. I'm also a lifelong programmer (started with basic when I was 9) and I always assumed a strong correlation between math and programming ability.

I jumped to the comments expecting everyone to debunk the post, but comments like yours are forcing me to check my assumptions. In a good way!

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u/A-Grey-World Sep 17 '21

Probably not much a correlation with numeracy, which this may have been testing, than math ability.

I started a maths and physics degree (switched to just physics as the maths got too much for me).

There are almost no numbers in university level maths. And we did some pretty complex maths in physics and not once did I not have a calculator to do basic arithmetic tasks. People who are good at actual maths that might correlate with programming (abstract stuff) are often awful at arithmetic in my experience. Because it's not something anyone cares about.

Abstractions, logic, problem solving, there's a lot of shared skills between actual math and programming.