It's funny that this popsci article instantly succeeded in dividing the HN commenters into math/not-math camps. Porque no los dos?
Programming is the manifestation of thought through the medium of a keyboard and screen. If you are a clear thinker, if you can hold multiple things in your head at once, if you can reason about things and their relations, well, you can be a strong programmer.
It seems wholly unremarkable to me that someone new to Python would not be fazed by it, given it's fundamental basis in words (print, if, etc.) Someone with a background in languages, who can think well enough to explicitly or implicitly pick up the structure of the language, is gonna do just fine. "Oh, so when I see a while, I need to end with a colon" isnt so different from "when I shout, I need to add a ! at the end"
(Java gets a special place in hell for forcing "public static void main" on every beginner.)
Math only really comes into it when you want to reason about things that have a history of being manipulated mathematically, typically for reasons of convenience. You could probably invert a matrix in SNOBOL, but its a lot easier to pull out lists and arrays and linear algebra.
In other words, lets see the follow up paper to this where Python newbies are asked to model the trajectory of a bead on a wire and see how they do.
Programming is the manifestation of thought through the medium of a keyboard and screen. If you are a clear thinker, if you can hold multiple things in your head at once, if you can reason about things and their relations, well, you can be a strong programmer.
It seems wholly unremarkable to me that someone new to Python would not be fazed by it, given it's fundamental basis in words (print, if, etc.) Someone with a background in languages, who can think well enough to explicitly or implicitly pick up the structure of the language, is gonna do just fine. "Oh, so when I see a while, I need to end with a colon" isnt so different from "when I shout, I need to add a ! at the end"
(Java gets a special place in hell for forcing "public static void main" on every beginner.)
Math only really comes into it when you want to reason about things that have a history of being manipulated mathematically, typically for reasons of convenience. You could probably invert a matrix in SNOBOL, but its a lot easier to pull out lists and arrays and linear algebra.
In other words, lets see the follow up paper to this where Python newbies are asked to model the trajectory of a bead on a wire and see how they do.