Language Aptitude Not Math Predicts Programming Skill

  • I guess it depends who you are talking about. Computer Scientists are generally great at math, but it doesn't mean they are good programmers. A good programmer has style: from how the code looks, to how it is arranged, test, regressed... to how defensive the code is to soft-failures. I've worked with spectacular computer scientists who wrote compiler kernels, but their code looked like a big pile of... well, you get it.

  • Makes sense, as naming is the one of the two hardest problems in programming!

    (the other is maintaining distributed cache consistency and catching off-by-one-errors :D)

  • In general, you don't need to be exceptional at math for doing programming. A basic understanding of arithmetic is sufficient. Okay, perhaps if you work with numerical analysis on daily basis, or doing type theory/lambda calculus/any theoritical computer science stuffs.

  • It's 2020 and the g factor ism't mainstream