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   David Young (roboguy@mathstodon.xyz)'s status on Tuesday, 30-Jun-2026 00:35:47 JST David Young

   Seeing another post go viral that says something along the lines of "I was confused by math until I realized it's just programming with more confusing syntax."

   I think at some point I'll write a blogpost about why that's a misguided and mostly counterproductive perspective...

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     David Young (roboguy@mathstodon.xyz)'s status on Tuesday, 30-Jun-2026 01:39:30 JST David Young

     • Matthew Lyon

     @mattly I'm not familiar with that book, so I can't really speak to that.

     In my opinion, a very important and common trap is to think that all mathematical expressions/equations directly give you an algorithm. This is true *some* of the time, but it is very often not true. If math were truly "programming but with different syntax," then that would always be true.

     Much of math is closer to a specification than an algorithm. But not all specifications are executable (and that's ok)!

     In my view, that spec vs implementation perspective is much closer to what's actually happening, and as a result is less misleading. There is still nuance beyond that, but I think it's helpful and will take you a lot further.