Why won’t anyone teach me math?

Re:Why won’t anyone teach me math? by vkou on Friday February 11, 2022 @03:28PM (#30306612)

No, a compiler is to programming as what construction is to structural engineering.

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Re:Why won’t anyone teach me math? by mcguire on Friday February 11, 2022 @04:18PM (#30307103)

"It is the most common way of trying to cope with novelty: by means of metaphors and analogies we try to link the new to the old, the novel to the familiar. Under sufficiently slow and gradual change, it works reasonably well; in the case of a sharp discontinuity, however, the method breaks down: though we may glorify it with the name "common sense", our past experience is no longer relevant, the analogies become too shallow, and the metaphors become more misleading than illuminating. ... On the historical evidence I shall be short. Carl Friedrich Gauss, the Prince of Mathematicians but also somewhat of a coward, was certainly aware of the fate of Galileo —and could probably have predicted the calumniation of Einstein— when he decided to suppress his discovery of non-Euclidean geometry, thus leaving it to Bolyai and Lobatchewsky to receive the flak. It is probably more illuminating to go a little bit further back, to the Middle Ages. One of its characteristics was that "reasoning by analogy" was rampant; another characteristic was almost total intellectual stagnation, and we now see why the two go together. A reason for mentioning this is to point out that, by developing a keen ear for unwarranted analogies, one can detect a lot of medieval thinking today."

-- https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD10xx/EWD103...

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Re:Why won’t anyone teach me math? by Retric on Friday February 11, 2022 @06:54PM (#30308474)

I didn’t use an analogy, that requires comparing dissimilar things.

Some comparisons are just literally true, for example Honda vs Acura is the same as Lexus vs Toyota. Their both high end car brands owned by a parent company that also puts out mass market cars. That’s a description of strategy not trying to extract meaning from caparison between dissimilar things.

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Re:Why won’t anyone teach me math? by Retric on Friday February 11, 2022 @06:12PM (#30308146)

Compilers don’t build crap on their own, and machine code is still a thing.

Anyway, a farmer can build a shack without talking to a structural engineer, and a banker can muddle through coding an excel spreadsheet. But trying to muddle trough via trial and error isn’t enough to build the Burj Khalifa or a modern OS. Thus we want to use formal methods to minimize risks, costs, etc. That’s what gives rise to CS and engineering disciplines, not simply trying to staple math onto a field.

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