On the other hand, programming is actually a branch of engineering, a much less formal discipline. TIMTOWTDI, and not just in Perl. Everything in programming is subjective. Results of programmer's work aren't simply "correct" or "erroneous". Basing your work on a "false belief" will just require spending more effort on it, or lead to a lower quality product.

You can imagine an objective false belief, but it would be some kind of triviality, like wrong understanding of initialization order for base classes in C++, or behavior of modulus operator for negative numbers. Nobody is discussing this kind of stuff with any grandeur.

edit: tl;dr: in math it may be hard to understand whether you're objectively wrong. In programming it is usually as trivial as a compile-time or runtime error, so programmers will usually discuss subjective issues.

But if you look at the SO threads, the subjective issues aren't related to programming, they are mostly related to sitting at a desk or working for other people. That has as much to do with programming as telescopes have to do with physics.

(Though many of them hate their day jobs, and even the economic system itself, even if they're well-paid. These certainly aren't going to gush about what they experience during the day.)

I don't know how other people use Stack Overflow, but so far I've only visited when I want a quick answer for technotrivia which isn't particularly mind-expanding. (Like, how to get Gnu Screen to stop doing this, or what Unix incantation does that.) If others do the same, then I can see why there would be less technical fascination and curiosity on display there.

I don't see architects spending their time being envious of mathematicians. "If only we could construct buildings out of closed functions on a plane of pure ideology, where no humans would interfere..."

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1124968/most-harmful-misc...

In particular, there is part of computer science which has nothing to do with mathematics, and which a mathematician would always attribute to computer science rather than mathematics.

And that part is call "programming".

So I disagree. Sole programing without bullshit and without mathematics is still a profession of its own right.

Ultimately we program for people rather than machines, I hardly think you can describe readability, maintainability and elegance as bullshit. You can just as well program a correct algorithm with one-letter variable names and horrible nested gotos, but I'm sure the guy who has to maintain that will hardly describe the difficulties with understanding and maintaining the code as bullshit.

Theres lots of housekeeping [~bs] in programming, maybe some in math too.

I don't mean to disparage either craft, mathematics is a wonderful thing, and of course the applications are enormous and vital to science and engineering, however the majority of work is not applied.

Additionally there is some truth in this, in that the majority of working programmers are 9-5ers who have no passion for programming, whereas maths work is difficult to get into and not necessarily as well paid as other professions so those who work in it are necessarily more passionate.