Coders at Work: Reflections on the Craft of Programming

by Peter Seibel

Crockford: Mathematics is important in programming, but it's just one of a lot of things that are important. I think if you overemphasize the math then you underemphasize stuff which might be even more important, such as literacy. I mentioned I wanted to have the hiring requirement that they had to have read Knuth and I couldn't do that because I couldn't find enough people who had. The other thing I wanted was that they be really literate in whatever language they write to other humans. I want people who can write, because we spend a lot of time writing to each other. We're writing email or documentation. We're writing plans. We're writing specifications. I want to know that the people on my team are capable of doing that, and that turns out to be a really difficult skill. So I would actually rather see people start as English majors than as math majors to get into programming.