Discussion
Cuz I'm a software geek, I constantly get the "Oh, you must be good at math" thing.
I am *very* good at arithmetic, it's true. And I can recite my powers of 2 up to ~4 billion in less time than it will take you to finish that beer.
But whenever I do even *2d* graphics, let alone 3d, it's trig, or it's fucking matrix math, and I'm like, FUCK THIS FUCKING SHIT IT DOESN'T FUCKING MAKE ANY FUCKING SENSE I HATE YOU I HATE YOU I HATE YOU.
But. You know.
I just smile and nod.
@GeePawHill it's all just quaternions (fuck them!)
@GeePawHill I have the opposite problem. Absolute garbage at arithmetic, but applied mathematics (especially physics)? It's a puzzle that must be solved!
I have spent *days* fixing problems that arise from the fact that the y-axis is (generally) inverted in graphics libraries.
I am not kidding. That shit confuses me so hard.
I wind up having half my code know this and half my code not know it, and I can never tell which fucking half any given function is in.
Like. To the point of tears.
But I just smile and nod.
@GeePawHill I often wonder whether I’ve just always been too lazy for math or whether it’s actually true that I’m more interested in practical applications than in theory.
@merms It's some kind of reverse Sturgeon's Law, where, instead of 90% of everything being crap, 90% of programming is arithmetic.
@GeePawHill It’s just that, in a sense, computer science sometimes feels like an auxiliary discipline to me. We tend to build the tooling rather than work on the… first-class thing itself. There’s nothing wrong with that, of course, but I sometimes wonder how I ended up in programming instead of somewhere else. Math might or might not have something to do with it. Then again, I can see how a physicist or mathematician might say the same thing about their own work. 🙃
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