[traderjane]

You don't need fancy math because someone else did it for you, but if the industry is to compete and advance, it's going to need all sorts of people. The fact that you don't have to juggle every mathematical complexity underlying your domain is a success of human cooperation and compartmentalization. It's certainly not free or inherent.

[deadgrey19]

How so? Can you give an example?

[philote]

For example, if you do end up needing compression, are you going to write you own compression library or use an existing one somebody else already wrote?

[deadgrey19]

I think you're missing the point. I'm talking about the concept of mathematically modelling the program first, before writing it (as per the article). This process only applies to certain types of applications, ones that are rooted in algorithmic transformations (like compression), rather than in system and I/O operations, like copying a packet from a network RX buffer into a disk block, in the most efficient way.