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.

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.

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.

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.

This requires many assumptions that you or any computational system have no formal reason to make. Having an interpreter that just guesstimates exactly how you want the program structured, is going to run into problems when you, say want to extend the program.

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

Well it was a disappointing post. This is the sort of thing you keep as a novelty program that you run once a year.

I did seriously expect some modeling that wasn’t just rotating points.

Is it really a quasar when you use no actual physics 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.

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.

If we have insufficient information, how do we know that innocent people are actually being harmed, or if we do take action (the minimum action you seem to be advocating for is ostracism) against the accused how do we know that they are not the innocent ones?

Are we really supposed to resort to broad statistics when making intimate decisions?

Pretty sure they are arguing that any discussion about “non-majority-conforming” persons is moderated or censored by the existing majority to the disadvantage of the minority.

rustc,gfortran,GNAT,make,nano, and gedit. That’s basically every software I’ve used for programming in recent memory.