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When I was growing up, only math jocks ever were allowed to get near computers.
Luckily this changed.
You don't need to know any math at all to program computers. You need to be able to think logically. This has nothing to do with knowing math. Math may depend on logic, but logic needs math like a fish needs a bicycle.
Taking a very computation-heavy class is reminding me why I never liked math.
All those piddly little mistakes that cause you to get your answer wrong, even though you know the concept...............................
!!!!!!!! >:-{} !!!!!!!!!!
Of course you make those piddly little mistakes when you are programming computers, too, but you know before you hand it in if it's not working! You run it, and if it doesn't work, you *fix* it and run it again, repeating the fixing and running until it works.
And THEN you hand it in!
The computer goes through all the tedious steps, over and over and over, as many times as you need it to, and it doesn't mind a bit. Going through said steps is NOT a job for a person! We are too error-prone ... and ... it makes us crazy and unhappy.
All this "checking your work by hand" over and over and over is ... nuts. And nasty. And boring........................................
It kinda reminds me of typing my papers, in the bad old days.
Only worse.
Feh.
.
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4 comments:
This is my life, LOL.
How much do you have to do by hand? Do you not have programs that do the calculations? So the critical thing becomes the data entry, rather than the calculations?
If you are doing it by hand, yikes!
I have plenty of "data entry" type problems with my class -- when moving a number from here to there, I may not get it right. Or sometimes I can't read my own handwriting and put 2 for 7 or something.
And then I introduce the computation errors.
And of course all of that is on top of not understanding the math.
And all of THAT is on top of not understanding the concept...........
When it's "understanding the concept" that I want to prove to myself, it's really annoying (to put it mildly) that so much extraneous nit-picky busywork is between me and that.
Alas.
:-)
Somebody has to do the programs which *do* the calculations and allow the data entry. That would be me, mostly at my Applied Solutions job. The day job I get paid to do accounting and to do data entry into my own programs (at least while Beckie is on maternity leave).
Every character was originally typed by hand, starting in 1978. By now I have many routines that I can cut-and-paste without retyping, or link as subprograms.
I'd rather play with webpages, where there is less hand-coding than there used to be. Though I started out typing HTML one character at a time there, too.
I wonder just how many characters of code I have typed in over 3 decades?
Oh, yes, I know. Having spent the last 30 years programming, myself. :-)
I, too, have typed millions of characters by hand (including web pages, character by character). :-)
I can write code all day. It's doing the calculations by hand on paper that's driving me nuts.............
First I have to remember the math, and then I have to do the algebra (including calculations)......
Remembering what to do when I have to solve for P *and* Q, and trying to do it, and not getting a reasonable answer because I've written a 2 for a 7, or have used the mean for THIS group when doing calculations for THAT group....... Or whatever.....
We've been told in this class that describing the set of non-linear equations is like studying the set of non-elephants.
Describing the ways I can make stupid mistakes that stop me from getting a right answer is also like studying the set of non-elephants!
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