Programming

17354 readers

376 users here now

Welcome to the main community in programming.dev! Feel free to post anything relating to programming here!

Cross posting is strongly encouraged in the instance. If you feel your post or another person's post makes sense in another community cross post into it.

Hope you enjoy the instance!

Rules

Follow the programming.dev instance rules
Keep content related to programming in some way
If you're posting long videos try to add in some form of tldr for those who don't want to watch videos

Wormhole

Follow the wormhole through a path of communities !webdev@programming.dev

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

snowe@programming.dev

Ategon@programming.dev

MaungaHikoi@lemmy.nz

How Good at Math Does a Programmer Need to Be? (sh.itjust.works)

submitted 14 hours ago by anonymouse2@sh.itjust.works to c/programming@programming.dev

50 comments fedilink hide all child comments

I'm working my way to a CS degree and am currently slogging my way through an 8-week Trig course. I barely passed College Algebra and have another Algebra and two Calculus classes ahead of me.

How much of this will I need in a programming job? And, more importantly, if I suck at Math, should I just find another career path?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] tiddy@sh.itjust.works 4 points 8 hours ago (2 children)

Depends on the industry and depth you want to go to, gamedev for example you can do without any, but all lower level custom graphics and physics are pretty calculus heavy.

Website dev can be entirely independent of math

[–] refalo@programming.dev 4 points 8 hours ago* (last edited 8 hours ago) (2 children)

Depends entirely on your definition of "gamedev", IMO. If you're trying to write a platformer in basic C with no external libraries, you will absolutely need to use algebra/geometry/etc. and maybe even some more advanced things like physics/calculus depending on what features/effects you want to put in your game.

[–] tiddy@sh.itjust.works 3 points 8 hours ago (1 children)

I would uh consider that pretty in deep gamedev, even lower than some shader code lmao - so yes you would need to know some math.

Cracking open Godot and using a bunch of premade assets hardly even requires programming, much less mathematical knowledge

[–] refalo@programming.dev 4 points 6 hours ago* (last edited 6 hours ago) (1 children)

Be that as it may, I personally wouldn't consider someone to be a very knowledgeable (on how games actually work) game developer if they didn't at least know how to use things like linear algebra to make a character run and jump naturally and such, even if they're not coding like that day to day and just using a higher level framework.

You don't have to agree with me, and I still respect your opinion either way.

[–] groucho@lemmy.sdf.org 1 points 5 hours ago

I agree with you. Even if you never touch it, it's nice to know what the libraries you're calling are doing under the hood.

[–] GetOffMyLan@programming.dev 0 points 3 hours ago (1 children)

That's a really ridiculous example though. No one is doing that.

[–] refalo@programming.dev 1 points 1 hour ago

I'm doing that. I know several others who have as well.

[–] Valmond@lemmy.world 4 points 8 hours ago (1 children)

Ya, in gamedev you just need triginometry, lerp, quaternions, matrix multiplications and basic 3D math and maybe some more.

[–] tiddy@sh.itjust.works 1 points 7 hours ago

Me opening rpgmaker to do some matrix multiplication