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Re:Think in Math, Write in Code by hangonhn on Thursday July 18, 2019 @12:19PM (#20471358)
I think I am reasonably good at math compared to the average person and really loved it growing up and I would also agree that coding is not that similar to it. Coding is a lot more "tactile". It feels much closer to the arts than to math. The idea that we can treat computing as something purely abstract has never come to fruition for me because there are a lot of details in CS and some details matter a lot.

When I was starting out in my career, I worked at a hedge fund. The fund had a bunch of physicists and mathematicians working on models and they actually wrote the code for those models. They wrote some of the worst code I've ever seen. For example, rather than structuring their code properly, they would use exceptions to pass messages around. If function A needed some information from many levels deep in the stack, they would just throw an exception with the message inside. Function A would catch the exception. These aren't actual exceptions but they didn't to refactor their code. As you can imagine their code had horrific performance.

If you abstract away all the details a lot of concepts and constructs in CS look very similar but some of those details that were abstracted away are going to matter a lot when the code is actually run.

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