16
atheist
3y

Software engineers: "Maths is hard and scary!"

Also software engineers: "I've learnt to write a balanced binary search tree in c++ as interview prep!"

Mathematicians: "Have you guys heard of an AVL tree?"

Comments
  • 6
    Also mathematicians: "This is nifty! What shall we call it? Well... Our initials spell AVL...."

    Computer scientists: "Look guys, we've told you about naming conventions before, it's a binary tree that's balanced..."
  • 2
    yes but previously no and i forgot but i already knew how to make a binary tree :P

    we made those in high school lol
  • 4
    @AvatarOfKaine I think my point is that a lot of what we do is "math" by a different name.

    Sure, CRUD apps are bullshit, but whatever.

    Python has "sum", but if you show someone a capital sigma (math notation for sum), they start to look nervous. There are a lot of shared concepts.

    I guess I wonder what the difference is, what was missed in maths lessons that were present in comp sci.
  • 4
    @atheist crud is just part of an app :P
    the visual logic and user interface and queries form quite aspects of how well the app functions. that is just the atomic ops for storing the data. although, there is some degree of specialty involved in larger data models and there is always some work.

    i only take issue because i spent a year and a half working on a custom erp system, and it had some working pieces and the crap the customer kept requesting kept extending development.

    that and I was proud of the dal layer and stub generator I wrote and maintained, which built in alot of custom shit for how to handle sp generation and record locking etc.
  • 2
    I'm soooo tired today.
    i'm also sick of familiarity. you know ?
  • 1
    @AvatarOfKaine yeah... I think I'm pissed off with crud coz I'm doing it now, and it's literally some hacky thing that's an api that takes requests and runs a batch job. It's simple, most of the complexity is because we're running on-prem and using a library that the docs literally say "you might want to restart this thing periodically, maybe once an hour coz it can hang randomly and we don't know why".
  • 1
    What's avltree? A Villain' s Lovely Tree?
  • 2
    @johnmelodyme AVL trees are binary search trees, mathematicians have a silly habit of naming everything after the people that came up with it, so it stands for "Adelson-Velsky Landis" tree.
  • 1
    @atheist oh... Actually I'm googling it now.
  • 2
    @johnmelodyme something that would require me to look up big o notation again and think more than 4 hours of sleep really promotes lol
  • 1
  • 1
    @atheist in brief what is the major difference ?
  • 0
    @AvatarOfKaine they're literally the same thing.
  • 0
    Just mathematicians came up with them "first" (OK, one was a mathematician and computer scientist, the other was a mathematician).
  • 0
    But AVL trees are just the mathematical name of a balanced binary search tree.
  • 1
    Now that I've had to explain it, kinda ruins the joke, but also demonstrates my point 😅🙈
  • 1
    @atheist I don't get it. AVL trees are just one kind of self-balancing binary search trees (red-black tree, treaps, splay trees are others that come to mind, there are other more esoteric ones). What else would you call it?
  • 0
    @RememberMe AVL trees are sorta the archetypal balanced binary search tree. Probably what people mean when they learn about a binary search tree. AVL was also the first, at least according to Wikipedia.
  • 1
    @atheist
    What was missed in maths lessons that were present in comp sci:
    Proper naming of things and explanations, normal people can follow - instead of just reusing the same obscure symbols or single fancily drawn letters over and over to denote vastly different concepts and things.

    Math is hard because it comes with a notation and language where everything is overloaded with dozens of different meanings.
    and you definitely can't get any new concept when you missed anything that came before, as everything builds upon each other.

    It is a little like canonical Java OOP, where you have to dig through Mines-of-Moria-style type hierarchies to see, what the code actually does... Just with ten times the levels.

    TLD: Wanna know what is wrong in how math is explained - open any math-related Wikipedia page.
  • 0
    @atheist

    > what was missed in maths lessons that were present in comp sci

    Clarity.
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