Nope. I only learned to use computers as an adult, and only learned programming incidentally as a tool for other work.

The truth is that it’s actually much faster to learn as an adult, you just have more momentum if you start as a child.

Ada particularly the SPARK subset. It’s approach is quite different than most languages, focusing on minimising errors and correctness. It’s fairly difficult but I like to use it to teach people to actually understand the problem and how to solve it before they ever write the code.

This blog covers a lot of topics, but very superficially.

This blog covers a lot of topics, but very superficially.

“From computer science papers/academic texts I know this method of reading works perfectly”

This is almost certainly due to pure familiarity. CS papers are just as indecipherable to unfamiliar persons. Possibly even more since things like complexity are heavily used, without any explanation of what it is. Data structures are another common one that the vast majority of non-CS people would not understand when referenced.

I know because this is exactly how I felt coming from an intermediate mathematics background.

“So many papers are extremely hard to read because the formulas are obfuscated like that”

This isn’t really an issue though, of you don’t have enough foundational knowledge to understand what the formula means or how it could be conceivably derived, does knowing how it’s calculated matter?

Mathematicians are good at writing algorithms, but not at the development aspect, which is basically building for different systems, packaging software and documentation.

I would disagree on the performance part, the vast majority of software developers aren’t writing high performance software and the ones that are tend to be computational mathematicians or physicists.

Hmmm… yes Robert Evans the anarkiddie who tried to cite examples of business owners trapping customers in burning buildings to argue that incident response should be discarded in favor of a grass roots response and recovery mission by locals.

Robert Evans is blatantly biased and by his own admission actively participated in the “Rose City Antifa”. He’s literally the left-wing Andy Ngo, and equally brain-dead. But he has a nice voice so people still listen.

Sure but what degree of influence is actually “radicalising” or a point of concern?

We like to pretend that by banning extreme communities we are saving civilisation from them. But the fact is that extreme groups are already rejected by society. If your ideas are not actually somewhat adjacent to already held beliefs, you can’t just force people to accept them.

I think a good example of this was the “fall” of Richard Spencer. All the leftist communities (of which I was semi-active in at the time) credited his decline with the punch he received and apparently assumed that it was the act of punching that resulted in his decline, and used it to justify more violent actions. The reality is that Spencer just had a clique of friends that the left (and Spencer himself) interpreted as wide support and when he was punched the greater public didn’t care because they never cared about him.

“A deradicalising effect”

I’m sorry what? The idea that smaller communities are somehow less radical is absurd.

I think you are unaware (or much more likely willfully ignoring) that communities are primarily dominated by a few active users, and simply viewed with a varying degree of support by non-engaging users.

If they never valued communities enough to stay with them, then they never really cared about the cause to begin with. These aren’t the radicals you need to be concerned about.

“And those people diffuse back into the general population”

Because that doesn’t happen to a greater degree when exposed to the “general population” on the same website?

You’re literally on a platform that was created to harbor extremist groups. Look at who Dessalines is, (aka u/parentis-shotgun) and their self-proclaimed motivation for writing LemmyNet. When you ban people from a website, they just move to another place, they are not stupid it’s pretty easy to create websites. It’s purely optical, you’re not saving civilisation from harmful ideas, just preventing yourself from seeing it.

Some people (like myself and other scientists/mathematicians), write software for specific fields so if you follow them you find it out what work they are putting out, and issues they find in other software etc.

You could write bindings to machine-prime . Hardly anything challenging for an actual programmer, but I’ll take the free labor if it is available.

Wrote a basic primality checker library, it’s not by far my most interesting or complex project but I like that I accomplished all my initial goals in a timely fashion.

Well, it’s as fabricated as any other logical construct. That doesn’t mean it isn’t useful.

Reading Goldwasser’s paper on elliptic curves, got me into math and then automating math calculations.

It’s okay. The thing is when running an attack are you going to permutate through every combination of characters, or are you going to use words from a dictionary first? correcthorsebatterystaple (not a dictionary word) is better than antidisestablishmentarianism (a dictionary word) but in a realistic attack concatenating dictionary words is going to be the next step.

CamelCase directories and snake_case files.

But we are talking about a professional community, most people in this community that the post is about aren’t friends and likely don’t interact with each other outside of the work they do.

“Ostracizing” the accuser is generally voluntary. There is a difference between “I’m not comfortable working with this person” and leaving, and everyone coming to you and saying “Get out”.

The latter is fairly rare to happen to accusers, but it’s expected for the accused.