I’ve always flunked at math; and knowing how intertwined programming is with math, I’m skeptical of my ability to learn how to code. Can someone be too dumb to learn programming? If it helps, I’m mostly interested in learning Common Lisp.
I’ve always flunked at math; and knowing how intertwined programming is with math, I’m skeptical of my ability to learn how to code. Can someone be too dumb to learn programming? If it helps, I’m mostly interested in learning Common Lisp.
Just try it and decide for yourself. Make the computer do the math. I’ve done tons of angle stuff with quaternions in code and what the fuck even is a quaternion. What even is a matrix or imaginary number. Computer doesn’t care that I don’t know and just does what I tell it to. Results may not be what I hoped for sometimes but I can usually figure out what I did wrong after seeing the differences in the result.
“seeing the differences in the result”
This just means that you are testing against a very narrow output. It’s actually pretty common to run across tests that don’t even check for the likely failure cases, because the developer(s) don’t actually understand the algorithm.
A common example is prime factorisation, most nontrivial factorisation algorithms (Pollard rho, elliptic curves), don’t guarantee producing a prime factor they simply tend to produce them because they prioritize small factors. Programmers see that their function produces primes for the one or 2 test cases (out of say 2^64) and assume that it works. It generally does, but when it doesn’t you get incorrect results (often undetectably) which poisons all the rest of your calculations.