this post was submitted on 21 Dec 2023
101 points (93.9% liked)

Programming

17325 readers
209 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

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
 

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.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[โ€“] Synthead@lemmy.world 27 points 10 months ago

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 ๐Ÿ‘Œ