Re: Epistemology 201: The Science of Science

From: Wolf Kirchmeir (wwolfkir_at_sympatico.ca)
Date: 02/27/05 

Date: Sun, 27 Feb 2005 16:20:45 -0500

Albert wrote:
> Wolf Kirchmeir wrote:
>
>> Albert wrote:
>> [...]
>>
>>> This is purely anecdotal, but in my whole career working with college
>>> graduates having a variety of majors, I noted that mathematicians
>>> were singularly the most ineffective programmers, due primarily to
>>> their inability or unwillingness to step out of their bubble and
>>> actually grasp just what the problem to be solved really was.
>>>
>>
>> You're not the only one to have noticed this. In the early, early days
>> of recruiting programmers, it was found that musicians and housewives
>> generally did much better than math majors. Apparently the musicians
>> were already used to programming (a score is program, after all), and
>> housewives undertsood recipes...
>
>
> You should remove the word 'apparently' from your writing vocabulary, in
> that your assumptions are nearly always wrong. You would make a poor
> programmer because you believe that good programming consists of reading
> and following prewritten scores and recipes.

HUH????????

The reason musicians and hosuewives made good programmers (and they did
- look it up) is that they udnerstood how recipes and scores worked. So
they knew how to make them. A score is a program, so is a recipe -- or
hadn't you noticed? A recipe written for a trained cook is a program in
object code, even Unlike a recipe written for a beginning cook, which is
procedural.)

> However, that does work in
> your favor if you choose to be a mathematician.

I'm not a mathematician, but I'll let you figure out what my
professional work was.

For the record, I took a few programming courses, back in the days of
binary coding, and again later, coding for a VAX. I got good enough to
write 2 to 3 dozen lines of bugfree code on a first try, BTW, so you see
I did learn something. :-)

> I was there in "the early, early days of recruiting programmers". We
> were given aptitude tests that consisted primarily of pattern
> recognition. Good programming consists primarily in intuitional
> right-brain recognition of patterns in apparently unpatterned sets, and
> inventing left-brain algorithms that captured that pattern elegantly.

Yup, that's what recipe or a score is, a pattern. Clue: so is a poem.

> Most mathematicians are right-brain dead.

Not in my experience. You're thinking fo arithmeticians, such as
accountants and MBAs, I think. Or high school math teachers, who, sadly,
are rarely mathematicians.

> True. As I said you lack the necessary insight to be a good
> programmer. In the early days there were precious few definitions or
> rules. We had to invent our way through an unknown land.

Yup. I wrote quite a few programs for my own use, using BASIC and COMAL.
I also dabbled in Fortran, Forth, Pascal, Prolog, Smalltalk, C, and
others -- forgotten mnore than I learned. Loads of fun. But utlimately
boring. I'm unfortunately one of those people who enjoy finding the
patterns, but have little patience with actually using them. That is, I
enjoyed (and still enjoy) figuring out the structure of a program, but
don't have the patience, nor the ability to obsess over detail, that
good coding requires. That's why I didn't become a working programmer, I
guess.

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