Smithsonian Celebrates COBOL's 50th Anniversary With New Site

sciguy-Lmt0BfyYGMw at public.gmane.org sciguy-Lmt0BfyYGMw at public.gmane.org
Thu Dec 16 22:33:37 UTC 2010


More to the no-math idea, I still own a book by Doug Cooper called Oh!
Pascal!, whose idea for delivery of programming concepts was to teach it
with as little math as possible. The last edition I am aware of was
published in 1993, and I see that on Amazon, it still sells for 75 bucks.
It had some really fascinating programming problems in it. I got my copy
used, an earlier edition, for just 2 or 3 dollars. Books like this make me
wish that Pascal was back again as a teaching language (or that production
languages like Lazarus were more popular).

Paul

> On Thu, Dec 16, 2010 at 01:19:36PM -0500, Michael Lauzon wrote:
>>This is more for the programmers on the list, sadly, I'm not one of
>>them, I suck at math, so I know I wouldn't even be able to program.
>
> This is a myth I'd like to dispel.  My math skills are extremely
> rudimentary, but I can and do program all the time.  I have even, for
> several stretches, been paid to program (exclusively, whereas now my
> programming skills are just part of what I am paid for), though I
> am self-taught and have only high school math under my belt.
>
> There are programming tasks in which math skills are hugely important
> and an understanding of the underlying concepts may be essential, but a
> great deal of programming, especially modern programming, is not
> math-based and where math knowledge is irrelevant.
>
> Web programming is a domain in which there is little or no math, and
> which are still lucrative, rewarding and valuable.
>
> Just because you cannot solve for "x" doesn't mean you cannot program.
> Not programming is the only thing that is preventing mathematically
> unskilled people from programming.


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