Reader KW pointed me to this rant essay from Ruby on Rails enfant terrible Zed Shaw on what computer programmers don't know about statistical analysis, but should. (Spoiler alert: a lot, apparently.) Perhaps surprisingly, building complex software systems often involves a lot of simulation, experimentation, and measurement for which statistical methods would be an asset. But according to Shaw, many programmers often have no idea how many iterations to run a test for, or why an average is often meaningless if you don't also consider the variation, or how confounding factors can mess up an experiment. There's actually some good statistical advice here, illustrated with examples from R.
Zed Shaw: Programmers Need To Learn Statistics Or I Will Kill Them All
I love Zed. He makes me seem all mellow and calm. Ahhhhhhh.
Posted by: JD Long | January 26, 2010 at 19:13
The problems Zed Raises in his article have nothing to do with statistics. It's merely logical problem solving quality, or the lack of it for some programmers.
The books Zed mentions at the end of his article will give programmers even a bigger anxiety towards statistics....
Posted by: A. Programmer | January 27, 2010 at 01:02
I probably would be much nicer, but I have had the blind man conversation sooo many times. Just substitute biologist/engineer/social scientist etc for programmer. Sigh
Posted by: Nicholas | January 27, 2010 at 09:04