You do not need to know math to be a programmer, but it opens some doors
I’ve been going through something similar. I’ve done programming for years and I’ve never needed math skills. But recently, I’ve been thinking of all kinds of data mining projects that I’d like to do, so I’ve been reteaching myself algebra, and next year I hope to learn statistics. So I resonate with this:
A little while ago I started thinking about math. You see, I’ve been writing software for quite a few years now and to be totally honest, I haven’t yet found a need for math in my work. There has been plenty of new stuff I’ve had to learn/master, languages, frameworks, tools, processes, communication skills and library upon library of stuff to do just about anything you can think of; math hasn’t been useful for any of it. Of course this is not surprising, the vast majority of the work I’ve been doing has been CRUD in one form or another, that’s the vast majority of the work most developers do in these interweb times of ours. You do consulting – you mostly build websites, you work for a large corporates – mostly build websites, you freelance – you mostly build websites. I am well aware that I am generalising quite a bit, but do bear with me, I am going somewhere.
Eventually you get a little tired of it, as I did. Don’t get me wrong it can be fun and challenging work, providing opportunities to solve problems and interact with interesting people – I am happy to do it during work hours. But the thought of building yet more websites in my personal time has somewhat lost its luster – you begin to look for something more interesting/cool/fun, as – once again – I did. Some people gravitate to front-end technologies and graphical things – visual feedback is seductive – I was not one of them (I love a nice front-end as much as the next guy, but it doesn’t really excite me), which is why, when I was confronted with some search-related problems I decided to dig a little further. And this brings me back to the start of this story because as soon as I grabbed the first metaphorical shovel-full of search, I ran smack-bang into some math and realized exactly just how far my skills have deteriorated. Unlike riding a bike – you certainly do forget (although I haven’t ridden a bike in years so maybe you forget that too :)).
Broadening Horizons
Learning a little bit about search exposed me to all sorts of interesting software-y and computer science-y related things/problems (machine learning, natural language processing, algorithm analysis etc.) and now everywhere I turn I see math and so feel my lack of skills all the more keenly. I’ve come to the realization that you need a decent level of math skill if you want to do cool and interesting things with computers. Here are some more in addition to the ones I already mentioned – cryptography, games AI, compression, genetic algorithms, 3d graphics etc. You need math to understand the theory behind these fields which you can then apply if you want to write those libraries and tools that I was talking about – rather than just use them (be a producer rather than just a consumer – to borrow an OS metaphor :)). And even if you don’t want to write any libraries, it makes for a much more satisfying time building software, when you really understand what makes things tick, rather than just plugging them in and hoping they do whatever the hell they’re supposed to.