Programming advice: A return to my roots?

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After a few years in the world of journalism, I'm quickly finding myself bored and poor. While my graduation date from college looms close, I cannot but help remember the earlier and somewhat more pleasant college years. Back then, I was a computer science major, with some skills in C, C++, Java and xml.

Anyway, one of the things I most fondly remembered were all of my old contacts within the CS community who would contact me for work, where I could always earn myself a few dollars doing projects here and there. However, math was never my strong suit and this came to a head in college. After failing college Algebra for the third time, my mother pushed for me to be tested and I was diagnosed with AS. One of my major aspsessions is computers and technology, but one of my weak places is in math. I have dyscalculia. So, this leaves me at an odd spot. I love computers and like to work with them but I can't do math accurately to save my life. I changed majors to journalism because I simply could not afford to keep paying for flunked math courses and tutors, and have been pursuing this alternate course ever since.

I miss the computer science. I really miss playing with the computers every day and solving the problems, coding, and seeing it all work but I really really really do not look forward to the math again. Anyone else have a problem like this? What were some of your solutions? Ideas please!

I'm sorta having this problem right now.

In my case it's more of an ability to focus, a losing of interest (I like computers and coding but all this fancy E(algorithm) == 2.5 and stuff bores me).

You might look into languages that focus on other areas like Perl (text) or SQL/Database programming (data). Me personally, I do not have problems with math, but I've never studied a form of math above geometry, so my knowledge was quite limited.

Slowly over time, I have learned algorithms and math as represented in code, but I still prefer dealing with text (specifically, regular expressions/pattern matching and statistics) and back-end database programming.

ma_137, you talk about your graduation day looming, and about your earlier college years. Are you in the middle of a second degree?
Can I ask how old you are?

How did you find journalism? I would have thought that would be a difficult job for an aspie. Or at least a difficult job for an aspie to progress at. Of course many aspies write very well, and would make good columnists!

I would like to get into programming. I'm often surprised to hear about programmers who have trouble with maths (or are dyslexic). I thought both disciplines required fairly similar ways of thinking.

I have a maths degree myself. I was very lazy at university, so I never really found out whether I was any good or not. (I know that my inflexible way of thinking would sometimes make me repeat the same mistakes over and over, but when I did get to understand something - say, a formula - I was able to visualise it pretty well.)

Same here! I HATE the notion that math and computer science is somehow interconnected. It's not AT ALL. I'm terrible at math, but I'm great at programming, database administration, etc. For me, math is way too abstract. The only math I was good at was statistics and word problems-- I was able to understand them because they actually had a basis in something concrete as opposed to being random arbitrary numbers on a worksheet. I think I would have done better if my professors explained WHY various postulates and theorems work, rather than just telling us what they say and when to use them.

The most advanced "math" I've had to do for my programming job lately was to write a function that determines the median of a group of numbers. The most advanced math I ever had to do in my entire career was to take a latitude/longitude and convert it to an x/y coordinate on a graphical map. Even that was pretty basic geometry and I was easily able to find the required formulas online.

I dropped out of college, and taught myself a variety of programming languages. I've found that I learn best when I'm simply given a project and I have to learn it from there.

In my opinion, maths is all about necessary truth, so there's nothing "arbitrary" about it, whereas there is plenty that's arbitrary about programming (as illustrated by the fact that there are so many languages). But, thankfully, programming languages are far less arbitrary again than accounting and tax laws (zzzzzzzzz).
I can see that maths might seem arbitrary if you are taught about theorems but not about proofs. I'm now a computer science student, and we learn some mathematical theorems, although the proofs are never covered. I can imagine this might get quite frustrating if I'd never come across the theorems before, but with most of them I have.

I presume you did some maths at university, since you mention your professors? I found that when I actually did my maths degree, it was all about proofs and questioning "why?" In this way it was quite different from maths at school, where, for example, the trigonometric functions were just buttons on a calculator.

I do think, though, that I might have worked harder had I been studying programming rather than maths first time round, since if I'd been doing programming at university, it would have at least been something I could also imagine doing in a work situation.

Nitpicking here.

Yes it is. Quite strongly too.



That is not really computer science though. That sort of stuff you can take a few months long technical course to learn, don't need a degree to do it (though a degree certainly helps).

I'm 23, nearly graduated from school with my journalism degree. Computers have been my aspsession since 8 years old.

It depends upon the application. If you are working in a business environment and working with (for example) order transaction processing, an advanced knowledge of mathematics is not essential. More specialised applications (e.g. Within aeronautical engineering) may require more mathematical knowledge. I've always thought that a good knowledge of inductive and deductive logic is a good basis for a career in programming.

More nitpicking.

That's not computer science. That's just computer programing.

Now, if you were to measure several different programs and see which algorithm works best for different times, schedules, workloads, etc, that is computer science. But that is also quite hefty with the math.



Actually that's still just programming.

For reference, another area of computer science (one that is less strongly connected to math) is that of designing and classifying programming languages. E.g. functional vs imperative vs object oriented. DFAs, grammers, PAs, etc in describing closed languages, and so on...

Ahh, semantics! Note to self: GET TERMINOLOGY RIGHT. I just thought that it was a way for ma_137 to use the programming skills without getting into the mathematics.
My undergraduate degree is in mathematics, but I graduated over 20 years ago and I've forgotten most of it. I've only had to draw upon it once whilst working for a financial institution. I do remember that topics in pure mathematics such as algebra, analysis and geometry involved plenty of theorems, proofs and corollories. What level of mathematics do other people working in computer science find that they need to know?

Discrete mathematics, algebra, and calculus are a must. Beyond that, I'm not too sure ... a good understanding of logic is important. Especially symbolic logic. Discrete math and computer algorithms are heavy on proofs as well.