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Title question first: yes, you absolutely can be too dumb to program.
But as others have mentioned, being bad at math isn't necessarily a deal breaker, especially if you're taking about the actual arithmetic part of math.
What turns out to be key to programming is breaking down a problem into steps and figuring out the logic to do what you want to do. The computer is going to do the actual arithmetic, but you'll need to tell it what you want to do step by step.
Yes. But are most managers too dumb to figure out that you can't program? Also yes.
I was gonna suggest there might be a "too dumb to program for the profit of others", but ... yeah, even if your pay and code is a financial detriment, we can pretty much promise it'll be an insignificant portion of the money that company is costing itself. You gotta eat, and practice is practice.
That said, advice remains the same: program on company time towards a path you don't care about beyond covering your ass and trying to deliver what's been demanded(I'm not saying don't do your best, just keep it to what you can do on the clock), and see that as practice for passion projects on the side. Save a little bit of that no-fucks-given/objectivity for objectively testing and fixing your code - fix it like someone else made the mistake, and you can do it better, but at the same time something must ship(don't let perfect be the enemy of good).
I suck at math and believe that if you can think critically and solve problems, you can program. It is possible to learn how to break down a mathematical formula into its components and have the computer compute. You can't proof your work on your own at first, but there are tools that can.
Depending on what you're doing, you may even learn the math as you go like I did with game dev and vector math. Like any skill, it takes practice.
You'd be surprised how little math is involved in programming that doesn't require it. A significant majority of programming is simply managing conditionals. For example: "when the door opens, turn on the light."
Math comes into place when you need it, and hardly ever comes as a surprise. Additionally, solved problems are generally kept in libraries. For example, you don't need to calculate a sum; simply tell it to calculate a sum for you, because this is a solved problem.
What you're already running into is called "impostor's syndrome." You believe that you are not capable of something to some degree, even though reality says otherwise. You haven't tried your hand at programming, so why worry now? You're inventing problems for yourself before you even got a chance to start.
Just go for it and see what you think. If you don't enjoy it, no biggie. If you do enjoy it, keep going. No obligations 👌
Math is less important than logical thinking which often, but not always, goes with math skills. More important still is intellectual curiosity. Do you like solving puzzles? Do you like the feeling of breakthrough after a frustrating struggle figuring out how something works? Those will take you a long way.
Math knowledge is not essential; but really useful in programming as you're trying to make the computer do calculations of some sort.
Someone could definitely be too dumb to code though.
Programming success is more closely associated with language skills than math skills.
Yes, if you need to invent a new algorithm you'll need math. Computer Science is definitely mathematics heavy.
But writing a program is all about expressing your intent in a programming language, step by step. It's about "communicating" with the machine (and your users).
All this to say, I got C- and D grades in my math courses in college and still became a successful computer programmer. I'm not pushing the boundaries of computation, but if you need an app for your business, I can build that for you in a reliable, tested, and flexible manner.
Edit: Also! I love Common LISP. It's such an amazing language and I'm so sad that it isn't more popular in the industry.
But writing a program is all about expressing your intent in a programming language, step by step. It's about "communicating" with the machine (and your users).
And your coworkers, and 'you a year from now'. For the love of god have some compassion with 'you a year from now' and save him a day of debugging.
80% of programming jobs will only require basic maths.
A lot of the time you're glueing together libraries written by much smarter people haha
It's more about logic than maths. People absolutely can find it too hard.
Nah, no need to worry. I've got a friend that was bad at math and therefore dismissed a career as programmer initially. Eventually, he just couldn't ignore how much programming interested him and did start a Bachelor's degree in Computer Science (after disliking his first year of Finance). A couple of years later and he's the proud owner of a Master's degree in Computer Science while still being relatively bad at math, but it didn't stop him. Nor should it stop you.
I'm glad it worked out for your friend! However, I've got to know, why did they choose to pursue Finance of all things if they didn't like math??
You can be but it's very rare to find someone that is.
For programming I always tell folks you need 3 skills: adaptability, self-reliance, and strong problem solving (thinking outside of the box, etc)
The most lacking skill I see new students is self-reliance. Learning to do your own research, knowing when to ask for help and when not to, etc.
Have too low IQ? Yeah sure, I guess.
Be slower at it than the norm? Absolutely.
I only learned Algebra by learning programming and through that I learned how to think abstractly (abstract just mean "hiding details" - think of how a child draws a car. You can't tell it's colour, brand, model, etc, yet you can tell it's a car, even though all those details are hidden). Once I got that, I was able to follow videos from MIT that taught me more of the maths, giving me a theoretic foundation for programming. Now I'm doing an Algorithm course (also MIT) and feel like an "actual programmer" (because I felt like a "fake programmer" before that - though that still sometimes returns). After that I intend to learn more about SQL because I'm painfully lacking in that regard.
Anyway, I've been at it since 2005 when I was a 20-something kid, and there's always something new to learn.
FYI: I made a dependency graph of a bunch of freely available MIT courses, left is a dependency for stuff on the right: https://thaumatorium.com/articles/mit-courses/
Woah, you feel like an actual programmer? I thought we were all stuck with imposter syndrome forever!
No, as evidenced by basically the entire industry. Don't fret it, all you have to do is be smarter than your boss, and that's fucking easy.
Yes but it's a low bar and failing math in school doesn't mean much. Just try writing programs, be a little stubborn about it, and see how it goes.
I am not particularly good at math myself, but I like to program stuff... If I am any good at it... decide for yourself: https://github.com/matejc?tab=repositories ... anyway, if you have interest of doing something, stop the doubt, just do it.
Not much to do with maths unless you go into calculation heavy industry. Coding is just problem solving and reading bad documentation 95% 0f the time.
The other 5% is writing bad documentation
Usually when people say “I suck at maths”, it means that they are bad at doing manual calculus. Maths is extremely useful in programming, but it’s absolutely not the same kind of math. I don’t think that the grade you had in math at school will influence in any if you will be good or bad in programming.
I wish I could get my head around programming. I've tried learning from books, I've tried learning from codecademy, and all I can do is follow the lessons, I don't understand how I'm supposed to turn all these lines of gibberish into a program that does something. The most common bit of advice I get is "Just make up a project! Find something that you want the computer to do, it's easy and fun!" And I'm over here like... "OK, how?" It's like someone pointing to a pile of metal and a welder and saying "Build something!" Sure, someone who knows how to weld can do that, but most people are going to need more information.
You need to pick a project to start out so you have a goal, then from there it's just google searches for each individual part.
I started learning in High School because I wanted to create a game. I had learned a little bit of Java from a book my dad gave me, but I was kind of in the same spot as you at first where I didn't know how to do anything other than follow along with the book.
But once I sat down with my goal to make a game, and just started Googling stuff, that's when it started to click.
Python has easy syntax, so that might be a good place to start. You could google: "Python game library" and it would pull up something like PyGame. Then you could look up "Pygame tutorial" which would give you a baseline on how to set up a window, etc. If you have a hard time with Python fundementals, you could just google "python for loop" or "python functions".
That's pretty much what my learning process looked like: start with a goal, google how to get started, google each problem as it comes up. I still follow that same process to this day, and I have a CS degree now.
At the end of the day, it's a skill just like anything else. Just takes practice. I don't think anyone is too dumb to learn it, but it depends on how much you want it. If it's not worth the effort for you then you probably never will.
What I tell people is to find something you regularly do manually, and automate it. I download a lot of torrents, then need to rename the many many files so my media server knows what they are. That’s something that can be automated. A perfect project for someone who’s just learning to program.
Why not try simple scripts at first? You could write a little script in Bash, JS, or Ruby to create folders or text files. Besides the very basic stuff I did on the high school robotics team, my first programming project was when I worked as a print broker and we invested in a digital press. I needed a program to calculate the cost of a print job, so I learned a little BASIC and wrote a program on my TI-98 to do it for me. It would ask a series of questions (eg - paper cost, single / double sided, color / black and white, how many imposed on an SRA3 sheet, etc) and spit out the cost of the job.
As for how you use the code, say you write a ruby script; to run it, you'd navigate to the script directory in the terminal and type ./scriptName.rb to run it. If you're using a compiled language, you'd compile it (your lessons would cover how to do this) and then you'd run the resulting binary the same way.
Most common reason for being bad at programming is finding it boring and thinking the tools are needlessly obtuse.
If anything this is a sign of great intellect.
Let's see. I don't like math syntax. And you can hound me with Haskell. But i like Python and Rust and Shell. So i guess, not generally.
What even is "learn how to code" these days? I work in PowerShell, Shell, Docker Compose, and various xml, yml, json config files. Do I code? When I debug a particularly nasty DNS bug using netcat, dig, nsupdate and other tools it certainly feels like when I was coding Java. And when I push a CI-CD workflow to our tools git repo I work in many of the same tools as the Developers. But I'm not even sure I'd call what I do coding.
That said you can be too "dumb" (hate that word) or rather disadvantaged that you can't figure out doors and then coding is probably a step too far. But if you can grasp the English language and use it to construct sentence and describe a work task to a colleague for them to perform with it then you can certainly learn how to build at least simpler programs in a programming language, it's really not all that different. It's the language of how to tell a computer to solve a task.
i would say no, as there can be programming you can begin that doesn't involve math. what I would recommend is to begin your own project by looking to see what you can automate in your life.
when I was in middle school, I told a teacher I wanted to program when I got older, and she scared me because she said that involves a lot of math. at the time, I hated math, so I avoided programming completely. it wasn't until I was 24 that I gave it a shot and was so upset at how misinformed I was. I wish I could turn back time, but oh well.
is there something you do at your current job that you think can be automated?
Because of problems at home I skipped maybe 80% of high school and lucked my way into college. I’m probably as dumb as a programmer can be but still do it professionally.
I hate the “if I can do it anyone can” remarks but in this instance it’s totally true
People equate maths to programming, but I think if it more as a creative, problem solving field. Most real world coding problems don't have a precise single correct way to solve them; it's more like architecting a building: you have multiple goals and a lot of freedom in how you achieve them and to what degree
You can definitely learn to program without being great at math. Obviously, depends on what kind of programming.
If you want a computer science degree though? You’ll need the math.
Like with anything, you will not know if you are going to be good at it until you spend a lot of time trying and failing and learning. If you enjoy it, just keep doing it.
I have been programming for years, and although I did minor in math, I can only think of 2 times that I have ever needed any math beyond that of highschool algebra. And those were very niche one-off situations. As others have stated, logic is much much more important, and a good understanding of Boolean logic will take you MUCH farther than any other math related discipline. But even still, logic is, well.... logical if you just think about it. You really don't need to take any courses on it.
I think the main barrier for entry is that there are simply too many options and different paths to go down when beginning to learn. Also, there just aren't too many really cool things you can do as a beginner that are truly interesting and will keep your attention. The typical "hello world" exercises are boring as hell and of course people aren't going to keep being engaged when they're bored.
That's why I usually recommend beginners who want to learn to start with an Arduino, regardless of what their final goal language is. Generally speaking, once you learn one language it's pretty easy to learn others, as the foundational knowledge is mostly the same i.e. variables, loops, functions, etc.
What I think is great about the Arduino is that your code produces a physical, tactile response. Usually one of the very first programs you write (which can be completed in probably 10 minutes by a beginner) is making an led flash something like "SOS". This is leaps and bounds more interesting than something like "hello world" and will usually keep you interested and engaged much longer while learning the basics.
I started on an Arduino many years back after stumbling upon a Paul McWhorter lesson randomly on Reddit. After becoming pretty proficient with an Arduino, I transitioned over to JavaScript and started learning web development, and I'm now a full time engineer.
Keep in mind that many math teachers are incompetent at their jobs - some of that may have had little to do with you.
Though you are correct that math does involve patience, a willingness to fail often until you eventually get it right, and a logical progression of steps where at each stage you keep track of the results of previous steps.
I'm saying that you can most likely do it! Though it may be frustrating, especially at first, while you sharpen those skills that math should have taught you but bc of cheapening out in education, you may have skipped over. It's all up to you now though... my advice is that even if it takes you 10 to 100 times longer than someone else to do some little thing, so the fuck what, the important thing is that you can do it! (And if you practice, it gets a heck of a lot easier over time) I love this quote (from C.S. Lewis):
Don't judge a man by where he is, because you don't know how far he has come.
I suck at math and I know programming fairly well. It's more about logic and order of operation than anything. Knowing when to add, subtract, multiply or divide. At least when it comes to math knowledge needed. I feel like most people, even the worst at math, know when to use certain operations even if they couldn't solve the equation they wrote.
I failed math 3 years in a row in high school and I made plenty of minecraft clones using nothing but logic and basic algebra. Math isn't as important to programming as people say, I still can't do division or multiplication on paper, but in a program, I can make it do that for me.
You doing C++? Avoid.
You doing basically anything else? You'll prob be fine with regards to math.
Programming is all about understanding relationships. You make a thing. Great. How do you identify thing? How do you reuse thing? You identify what it is and what it does. Do other things do what your thing does? Great! Make an identifier for that shared ability. Now you can call the shared identifier with other things and so on...
Anyways, I sucked at algebra which seems to be the most commonly identified issue with those of us "bad at math". I have never used more than basic algebra (something + something = something aka x + y = z). Maybe in 50s and 60s when programming was extremely hard you needed to be good at math, but that's absolutely not the case any more.
Find something you want to create in Lisp then do it! You will face problems, but you will always find solutions online and that's how you will learn and good at this. Anyone can learn I think, it's a matter of motivation like everything else, and having a goal helps a lot.
Primary and secondary school math is mostly arithmetic and memorisation. It's not until late high school and university when you get to do real math, which is a study of logic and proofs. If you were horrible at math in school, you might still have the makings of a great mathematician.
In most case, you don't need to be good at Math to be good at programming
No, I don't think so.
It just takes a bit longer for some to grasp certain concepts of a programming language. If I think I need more time I try to solve an issue for my own projects first. When I need a thing for work, it won't be the first time anymore I see a particular problem and deal with it faster.
I consider myself an average programmer, but I am also proud of the programs that do some valuable things for me and I can rely on. You can always go back to your old code and optimize it as soon as you learn new things.
I have respect for those who seem to program only at work and don't show when they are in trouble (stressed because of deadlines), but in the end their code works, too, after it came back from the second review.
You don’t need to know math or physics to build a house. Sure, it can help if you know those things, but it’s not essential.
Same goes with programming. Math and programming are two separate skill sets, but knowing one can probably help with the other.
Also, a question for you. Why do you want to do Common Lisp? If you’re skeptical about your abilities I recommend to start with a more common programming language (like Python, Java, C#). Easier to find good learning resources.
I think anyone can be too dumb for anything. Personally, there are many things that I feel like I am too dumb for. Specifically things that require artistic ability or emotional thinking. Even as a kid I find subjective topics completely baffling. I always loved math because I was either right or wrong, and I liked science because my hypothesis was some variation of right or wrong. Could I learn an instrument, sure, but by the time I get any good I could have gotten substantially better at something that clicks for me.
Don't get me wrong, if you find it interesting and have passion for it, that could probably overcome what you are lacking with enough time.
No unless you're terribly bad with basic algebra and discreet math. When people that interested with programming say they're bad at math, they usually mean they're bad with calculus.