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How Relevant is Calculus?
| You might use it once in your whole life... It's just one of those useless pre-reqs that you have to take for no real reason.
| This is because you program mediocre software. Try to get into driver programming, data analysis, geology sooftware making, fluid mechanics, soil slide prediction for building foundation calculation, effects of wind in scyscraper stability, projecting wind tunnel data for designing efficient airframes, sonar reflection signal interpretation...
Programming is more than dragging widgets in an ide and selecting which bitmap to show on the screen when a menu entry is selected.
| ^ that. Calculus is for physics programming usually. It's a thing in machine learning too.
If you're just into, say, web or UI development, then no, it's not really important.
| >>187551 The fun part is also that some will respond with "but I can do that with an #include or import clause and just call the functions", forgetting those functions are written by someone else. That is basically the reason why a game usually costs 50 eur and SAP software 5000.
| >>187523
>mediocre software
General-purpose != Mediocre.
Not everyone use the examples you mentioned. I don't dispute or dismiss the function of calculus — hell, I've taken a good use out of logarithms in some of my codes myself, but to say that general-puporse programming is 'mediocre programming' is a bit condescending.
| Nah all software is mediocre unless you are writing the bytecode on a napkin in the car with no light
| >>187566
Even thougt SAP is bloatware/snakeoil.
Real perfomant calculation software runs on scientific supercomputers and cluster systems and is open source, developed on universities, paid by government which gains money from taxes big IT companys avoid to pay.
Stuff like SAP are just overrated proprietary marketing toys. Had to work with it once, and it was awful. Most people need courses to handle this monstrosity - offered by SAP (additional costs + time loss).
| I don't think I've ever had to use it explicitly, like, "oh shit let me integrate this function to yield result x"... but it's useful to have a backgroud in mathematics, particularly calculus and statistics, when you're in computer science, for various things, like asymptotic analysis and finding minimum and maximum values of functions to achieve the best performance possible in your code.
| Should have prefaced I don’t mess around with machine learning and engineering based tasks. I’m taking code classes for a basic minor in IT or games programming
| >>187523
Mediocre is a little harsh, you tell that to my professors since they’re the ones who only give me assignments to build UI menus and write text files
| It may come in handy especially when doing computing theory. Im no expert but I can imagine it being useful when trying to map the structure of advanced computing. Perhapse where commands are less linear and require integrals. AI reaserch etc. Again, just my best guess
| Calculus is extremely important in balancing large complex games. You might not directly program with it but it's useful when determining which cards are OP in Hearthstone or Slay The Spire. Monster scaling in games like Skyrim or Final Fantasy was likely determined through a lot of calculus and data analysis.
| Other aspects like Physics and AI were already mentioned, but more than likely physics in games is something you won't have to worry about if you use off the shelf engines. AI in games is still extremely simple and doesn't use any of the more modern research into highly generic AIs like Google Assistant or Siri.
| In graphics programming in games, while linear algebra and vector math are certainly the most important mathematics to learn, calculus will allow you to write REALLY weird and specific shaders. Since programming on the GPU is really more of art than science, any knowledge of math becomes useful in the end.
| I use it in electrical R&D. Optimization problems are most of what I see, but I hear that most of it gets used in chemical engineering and pharma.
| I studied computer sciences and i too thought calculus was going to be useless in my work life, now im data analyst and program machine learning algorithms and basicly i use calculus and statistics for everything. My answer is: depends on what you are going to work with, same for pretty much all the classes in a graduation course.
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| And by this question I mean: many of my university classes on programming and technology require me to take calculus as a pre-req but never once in one of these classes have I needed to use calc. So far I’m great with Java and C#, never had to perform integral calculations when I’m making video games or data structures.