Refuting &#8220;The Mathematical Hacker&#8221;
<p>Evan Miller&#8217;s essay <a href="http://www.evanmiller.org/mathematical-hacker.html">The Mathematical Hacker</a> is earnest, well-intentioned, and deeply wrong.  Its errors begin with a serious misrepresentation of my views and my work, and fan out from there.</p>
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<p>Miller chracterizes my views as &#8220;Mathematics is unnecessary [in programming] except in specialized fields such as 3D graphics or scientific computing.&#8221;  But this is not even a good paraphrase of the quote he cites, which says hackers &#8220;won&#8217;t usually need trigonometry, calculus or analysis (there are exceptions to this in a handful of specific application areas like 3-D computer graphics).&#8221;  </p>
<p>What I am actually asserting in that quote is that <em>continuous</em>, as opposed to <em>discrete</em>, mathematics, is not generally useful to programmers.  I sharpen the point by continuing thus: &#8220;Knowing some formal logic and Boolean algebra is good. Some grounding in finite mathematics (including finite-set theory, combinatorics, and graph theory) can be helpful.&#8221; </p>
<p>This (which Miller blithely ignores) is very far from asserting that hackers can or should be indifferent to mathematics.  Rather, it is me, as an erstwhile mathematician myself, attempting to point aspiring hackers at those domains of mathematics that are most likely to be useful to them.  Much of theoretical computer science builds on these; automata theory and algorithmic complexity theory are among the more obvious examples.</p>
<p>Having gone wrong right at the start, Miller swiftly compounds his error: &#8220;If you are a systems and network programmer like Raymond, you can do your job just fine without anything more than multiplication and an occasional modulus.&#8221; This is somewhat too narrow about the scope of what I do, and even if it were accurate Miller would be arguing against his own case by taking <em>far</em> too narrow a view of what mathematics a &#8220;systems and network programmer&#8221; can use. </p>
<p>In fact, it is routine for systems programmers to have to grapple with problems in which graph theory, set theory, combinatorial enumeration, and statistics could be potent tools if the programmer knew them. If Miller knows this, he is being rhetorically dishonest; if he does not know it, he is far too ignorant about what systems programmers do to be making any claims about what they ought to know.</p>
<p>Thus, when Miller asserts that I would agree with the claim &#8220;from a workaday perspective, math is essentially useless&#8221;, he is ludicrously wrong. What he has done is conflate &#8220;math&#8221; with a particular <em>kind</em> of mathematics centered in calculus and continuous analysis &#8211; and as a (former) mathematician myself, I say this is a form of nonsense up with which I do not intend to put.</p>
<p>Miller perpetrates all these errors in his <em>five opening paragraphs</em>. Sadly, it only gets more dimwitted from there.  Consider this gem: &#8220;One gets the impression reading Raymond, Graham, and Yegge (all self-styled Lisp hackers) that the ultimate goal of programming is to make a program that is more powerful than whatever program preceded it, usually by adding layers of abstraction.&#8221;</p>
<p>This is superficially profound-sounding, but nonsense. I admit to not being familiar with Steve Yegge&#8217;s work, but Paul Graham is hardly lost in layers of abstraction; he used his Lisp-programming chops to build a company that he sold for $50 million.  One of my best-known projects is GPSD, which gets down in the mud required to do data analysis from navigational sensors and is deployed on millions of embedded platforms; another is GIFLIB, which has been throwing pixels on all the world&#8217;s display devices since 1989.  Neither of us inhabits any la-la-land of pure computational aesthetics; this is Miller misreading us, wilfully ignoring what we actually code and ship.</p>
<p>From here, Miller wanders off into knocking over a succession of straw men, contrasting a &#8220;Lisp culture&#8221; that exists only in his imagination with a &#8220;Fortran culture&#8221; that I conjecture is equally fantastical.  Not absolutely everything he says is nonsense, but what is true is not original and what is original is not true.</p>
<p>Miller finishes by saying &#8220;Lastly, we need the next generation of aspiring hackers to incorporate mathematics into their program of self-study. We need college students to take classes in physics, engineering, linear algebra, statistics, calculus, and numerical computing&#8230;&#8221;</p>
<p>This is true, but not for the reason Miller wants us to believe it is true.  The bee in his bonnet is that continuous mathematics is generally useful to programmers, but that claim remains largely false and has nothing to do with the real utility of most of these fields.  Their real utility is that they require their practioners to <em>think</em> and to engage with the way <em>reality actually works</em> in ways that softer majors outside science/technology/engineering/mathematics seldom do. </p>
<p>That kind of engagement we could certainly use more of.  Arguments as bad as Evan Miller&#8217;s are unlikely to get us there.</p>
