Comment by adeelk | Hacker News Reader

Comment by adeelk | Hacker News Reader

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Bottomline, programming teaches us a lot of important skills and mental constructs useful for problem-solving and understanding how the world works. And those skills are hard to get elsewhere.

I definitely support the notion that everyone should learn problem solving skills, but people can take different paths than programming: mathematics, natural sciences, and even chess, for example.

As Richard Rusczyk, founder of Art of Problem Solving, says, “We use math to teach problem solving because it is the most fundamental logical discipline. Not only is it the foundation upon which sciences are built, it is the clearest way to learn and understand how to develop a rigorous logical argument. [...] This is not to say that those who cannot do math cannot solve problems. There are many paths to strong problem solving skills. Mathematics is the shortest.” [1]

And there have been many studies on the relationship between chess and problem solving, including this one by Ferreira and Palhares [2].

[1] http://www.artofproblemsolving.com/Resources/Papers/ProblemS... [2] http://www.math.umt.edu/tmme/vol5no2and3/TMME_vol5nos2and3_a...

> I definitely support the notion that everyone should learn problem solving skills, but people can take different paths than programming: mathematics, natural sciences, and even chess, for example.

I agree, though you'd have to go far over the school level of maths to get such benefits. Also, given that CS is a part of math, you can't avoid it if you want to learn some mental structures - we actually DID invent a new way of thinking in the last 100 years. And CS should be, in my opinion, tangled with programming, for a mortal to understand it and have fun with it at the same time.

So, in other words, by all means study math, but catching a bit of CS knowledge and programming skills at some point should be a natural consequence of it.

[...] you'd have to go far over the school level of maths to get such benefits.

Not at all. Even deriving the formula for the sum of the first n positive integers is something that requires problem solving skills while not requiring more than school-level maths.

Also, given that CS is a part of math, you can't avoid it if you want to learn some mental structures [...] by all means study math, but catching a bit of CS knowledge and programming skills at some point should be a natural consequence of it.

Huh? Physics is more a part of mathematics than computer science is. And I don’t understand what you mean by “mental structures”.

we actually DID invent a new way of thinking in the last 100 years

Could you explain what you mean by that?

Anyway, my point was that you can’t argue that everyone should learn programming just because it’s a way to learn problem solving.

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