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Comment by laichzeit0 | Hacker News Reader

It’s higher than that. People build software calling .search() and .sort() after a 4 month nanodegree and don’t know how to implement either. I’d say they are even using http requests without knowing what a TCP socket connection is, maybe even what an http request header is. The barrier to entry in the dev world is extremely low.

To relate it to maths: It would be equivalent to someone doing math research without knowing how to do proof by induction (in analogy to not knowing how to implement .sort())

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These devs don't need to. As long as they get work done, create `value', their skills are sufficient. Admittedly, there are times when people who know better are needed for specific tasks and that's why we are paid better.

Proof by induction is more akin to for-loop than optimized sort algorithms. It's often taught in the first mathematics course that includes proofs which can be Calculus II or even Linear Algebra. I would be surprised if a Math student did not learn it by their first Analysis course.

It's funny, I'd say that the reason these devs don't need to understand the lower layers is because the layering abstraction was built well enough. That's a good thing!

Lack of gatekeeping and general accessibility of software development is the beauty of this profession.

Sorry, let me rephrase. I didn't mean it in a negative way. The last time I needed to actually implement a sort method was when I was doing very low level embedded work and there wasn't one available on that platform (at least not one with the memory/compute trade offs I needed). I'm sympathising with mathematicians who have to build stuff on black-box stuff they don't full understand. Things are too complex to know it down to the CPU level, even so complex that modern devs don't even know how search and sort is implemented, but still get shit done.

I'm not a mathematician, but in the rare occasion I have to use the Pythagoras theorem, I use it without knowing how to prove it.

And that's OK.

(Mathematicians are probably too polite to moan about amateur plebs like me who didn't even learn primary school mathematics properly)

Behold! http://www.geom.uiuc.edu/~demo5337/Group3/Bhaskara.html

It's so pretty everyone should know it.

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