Jonathan Cast wrote:
Where, in the history of western civilization, has there ever been an
engineering discipline whose adherents were permitted to remain ignorant
of the basic mathematical terminology and methodology that their
enterprise is founded on? Why should software engineering be the lone
exception?
No one may be a structural engineer, and remain ignorant of physics. No
one may be a chemical engineer, and remain ignorant of chemistry. Why
on earth should any one be permitted to be a software engineer, and
remain ignorant of computing science?
Indeed. Because abstract alebra is highly relevant to computer
programming. Oh, wait...
Many people complain that too many "database experts" don't know the
first thing about basic normalisation rules, SQL injection attacks, why
you shouldn't use cursors, and so forth. But almost nobody complains
that database experts don't know set theory or relational alebra. Why
should proramming be any different?
Don't get me wrong, there are mathematical concepts that are relevant to
computing, and we should encourage people to learn about them. But you
really *should not* need to do an undergraduate course in mathematical
theory just to work out how to concat two lists. That's absurd. Some
kind of balance needs to be found.
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