Hi Monks,

Thanks to all for sharing your opinions on the above questions I have regarding programming and its relationship with Mathematics and Computer Science.

I had some thinking about those issues before posting them and I'm now quite convinced that I'm not alone in my views on them.

1) While having a good grounding in Mathematics is definitely a plus in one's mastery of programming, its relevance/contribution to programming is dependent to a large extent on the nature of the programming task. The more arithmetic the task, the more Mathematics is required. Certain programming tasks like coding a forum script has little to do Mathematics.

2) Again, while it's good to have a formal training in CS, it's not necessarily an advantage. Practical experience, logical thinking and other factors come into play.

3) I think perl is one such langauge to me - not that I know a lot of progrmaming languages. But I think it helps that Perl's creator, Larry Wall, is a linguist :)