thirdbIT

Sometimes Max worries that he must not be naturally technical because he always hated his math classes, and his brother and his father are both brilliant math people. ( I have a powerful memory of sitting in the garden on a brilliantly sunny day, idly reading a book, while my father-in-law sat next to me and worked through some multivariable calculus problems for the fun of it.) Max is not as bad at math as he insists on believing, but I also don’t think math really has much to do with run-of-the-mill software development. Sure, it’s helpful to know when a problem you’re working on can’t be solved by a brute force algorithm because it’s mathematically ridiculous, but not everyone is writing algorithms.

Anyway, here’s my new favorite person (well, Al Gore still comes first), _why, on his new supercool programming learning tool for kids, and why he doesn’t start his programming lessons with math.

Obviously there is a ton of math in a ton of different kinds of programming. But you can be a great, successful software developer and never get deeper into math than knowing that floats don’t come out of the database exactly the same as they went in. (No, we don’t quite get why either.. But we know not to use floats in situations where you’d like things to add up the same every time you add them. And we know it without ever having written our own compilers. Does this mean we aren’t hard-core? Then so be it. What’s wrong with a little airbrushing, anyway?