What is tougher, math or coding?

[Jason]

In colleges they make you take some university math to get a degree in coding. Well, where I went to school, you needed at least Calculus II and Linear Algebra. Anyway, some things are similar about learning coding and learning math. For instance, it takes a while to absorb both.

 

[Arantor]

Really depends what you're doing.

A lot of coding is really applied algebra, especially if you head off into the formal verification arena where you're not just writing code but proving that it is mathematically correct. Calculus has a place in certani branches of coding too but... honestly... it doesn't come up that often in some industries.

For example I do web development as a day job. The number of times I've needed algebra to a standard where you'd be getting university credit for it... maybe twice in my entire career. That said, having them as a foundation for understanding actual computer science (e.g. Dijkstra's algorithm, or Prim's algorithm, sorting algorithms) is useful but again... number of times these have come up in my professional career is currently... twice.

If I were in other fields - e.g. game dev, I'd need to know some of these a whole lot more, and calculus would be more useful. If you're doing 3D game dev in particular you really want to have some good basis in geometry, trigonometry and related fields (e.g. understanding quaternions)

 

[Arantor]

Fun fact, I literally just wrote a routine that uses Pythagoras's theorem. It's been a while that I've had to know that for a right angle triangle, the square of the longest side is the sum of the squares of the other two sides.

(Why do I care? Answer: I am working on a breakout game. I know how fast the ball is moving horizontally and vertically, but I don't know what the 'actual' speed is. But if I square the x movement and the y movement, add them together, there's the a^2 and b^2 for Pythagoras, and I can square-root the sum to get an overall velocity for the ball, which means that in my 'make the ball faster every 15 seconds' routine I can put a maximum speed on it by knowing the current velocity regardless of direction. I'd thank my math teacher for this but I can't remember which year of school it was that I learned this.)

 

[Ravenfreak]

For me math is a much tougher subject. It's taken me years to fully understand some basic math, it was my weakest subject. It took me a bit to understand the logic behind programming, I'm still not where I want to be with programming though or math. It depends on the person though of course.

 

[Arantor]

Programming *literally is math*. Algorithms are a subset of discrete/decision mathematics and all programming falls under lambda calculus.

 

[kensonplays]

I can't do EITHER very well, tbh. I need a calculator for anything besides addition/subtraction really. I had an extremely difficult time doing math in school. I did excel in English though, getting A's pretty much every year.

 

[Jason]

I find coding highly difficult. However,I've spent more time with math for the last 20 years. I mean coding skills could change with practice.

 

[Cory]

I can understand intermediate coding better than I can in advanced math. Though it took me forever to know what I know today, if I studied math for as long as I did coding, maybe then it wouldn't be as bad.

 

[Jason]

I can understand intermediate coding better than I can in advanced math. Though it took me forever to know what I know today, if I studied math for as long as I did coding, maybe then it wouldn't be as bad.

What math and coding do you know?

 

[Cory]

What math and coding do you know?

For math, probably mostly the basics like addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. Maybe a few other things too, but that's what I know best.

For coding, I know HTML, CSS, JavaScript/jQuery, and some Bootstrap.

 

[Tyrsson]

Once you learn coding very well. I suggest that you translate that into math... Believe it or not you will understand things about math that you did not realize.

 

[Empire]

Programming is one of those there's where it just clicks one day and that's it. It could take 2 weeks could take 2 years (like me). I was flying blind until sophomore year. I SUCK at math anyway.I had friends who dropped out of college because they could not pass any math class beyond college algebra. They struggled with fractions and square roots but could write very good programs, even better than me.

So, guess it depends via each person

 

[AjayJunkies]

I find math is really just one big programming language

Math has a specific syntax and keywords, creates reproducible results, and so on.

 

[zoldos]

I got really bad marks in Math during school. I then attended a Community College briefly (Web Design I and II). After that, I started coded websites. Never looked back.

As for which is more difficult, I'd say Math.

 

[Empire]

actual math is not just about understanding how to do very structured and specific problems to find solutions, it's about using many concepts to find the solution to an abstract problem. The thing is that this kind of math doesn't start until at least post-calculus. With programming, you're doing a very similar thing a different way, except that you get thrown into the "solve an abstract problem by puting together small pieces of things you know" much faster, because it takes MUCH less time to familiarize yourself with the base components of a programming language than it does to familiarize yourself with all the math needed to do something like calculus

 

[Arantor]

Did you know the reason Amazon Lambda is so named is because of anonymous functions (also known as lambda functions), which are a subset of lambda calculus?

 

[Debashis]

If you are good at math, you can learn coding easily. It's very much related to math. At least to build the fundamentals of coding, you need to be good at math, not brilliant but just being aware of different concepts in math and how to implement them in real-life scenarios to make life easier, helps a lot.