From: Rick DeNatale Date: 2006-08-10T06:09:04+09:00 Subject: Re: Newbie questions On 8/8/06, Jeremy Henty wrote: > On 2006-08-08, manowarrior wrote: > > > 2) Do I need lots of math to become a good programmer? > > Speaking as a mathematician who later became a programmer, I don't > think there's any maths you *have* to know before learning to program. > There are some areas of maths which are very useful for good > programmers to know, and learning maths is one way of developing the > abstract thinking skills that all good programmers need, but if you're > just starting to learn programming I think the important thing is to > get lots of practise writing programs. Don't worry about whether you > know enough maths, you can pick it up later if you need to. For now, > just write programs! This is a good perspective. Also depending on what you are doing, and this might not happen until you are well on your way programming, you will likely run into the fact that computers can only represent some math concepts, like real numbers, with a finite stand-in for reality. So even the math whizzes have to face the fact that they have to deal with variations between the 'correct' answers to expressions like 1.0 / 3.0 and what the computer can provide. Ruby is better than some other languages since it has arbitrary length integers, and optionally rationals, but it still can't represent numbers which require more bits than the computer has. There's a whole sub-branch of computer science, called numerical analysis, which deals with this issue. -- Rick DeNatale