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"Alcohol and Calculus Don't Mix. Don't Drink and Derive."
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Good one! Derive 
"A little time, a little trouble, your better day"
Badfinger
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When I was a CS major in the late 80s there was a ton of math including calc I and II. I barely made it through calc I...in fact I took it twice to improve my GPA. Soon after, I dropped out and spent 10 years doing shift work in a box plant.
From what I remember, the concept of arrays, especially multi-dimensional arrays, was what culled the herd more than anything else.
"Go forth into the source" - Neal Morse
"Hope is contagious"
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Almost did me in too 
Hadn't thought about it in 40+ years - reset timer to 40 MORE years
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I have a grandson who won a robotcs championship with the code he wrote.
I'd say he must be a good programmer.
We'll see how he does in calculus when he gets tohigh school!
CQ de W5ALT
Walt Fair, Jr.PhD P. E.
Comport Computing
Specializing in Technical Engineering Software
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Hmm. I received my B.S. in computer engineering in 1984. I earned 205 credit hours, 28 of which were math: Calculus I-IV, differential equations, and matrix algebra. While I've not used a great deal of the math I learned, the experience did help teach a valuable skill: representing real-world problems in abstract form so that they may be addressed in software and/or hardware. It also taught the idea that problems can have multiple solutions and the choice of method can have a profound effect on the outcome.
Software Zen: delete this;
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I never studied hardcore maths, and I'm nowhere near an expert in it. But, I totally agree man. I think every programmer should at least learn the basics. If you can't least read an equation and translate it into code, then do better.
Jeremy Falcon
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ditto gary
"A little time, a little trouble, your better day"
Badfinger
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Gary R. Wheeler wrote: representing real-world problems in abstract form so that they may be addressed in software and/or hardware
Presumably you had already had word problems and algebra before you even got to the university. Seems like those should have taught you that.
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Lol - I left school at 15, did not even finish high school, I have no idea what calculus would do or be used for and yet I had a highly successful career writing business solutions. You could not take that path today but in the 80s/90s it was possible.
Never underestimate the power of human stupidity -
RAH
I'm old. I know stuff - JSOP
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I would say they cannot be good programmers.
Note that the question is not if a one can be a good programmer without knowing freshman calculus.
What is being asked (at least in my understanding) is if a person that lacks the mental ability to understand freshman calculus can be a good programmer.
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Short answer: YES.
The long answer, (from the long article you linked to) is DUNNO. OK... that's not a long answer either. The real long answer, is: the article is really about whether including calculus in a Computer Science degree is:
a) a good idea
b) necessary
c) putting students off taking CS degrees.
(a) and (B) weren't really answered
and (c) was: yeah. it is putting people off CS
So my conclusions are:
- this question would have been more suitable to Quora than Code Project
- the article linked to, was very long and mainly pointless
- cats are better than dogs - just as relevant as all the other %$&*. 
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Quora is a horrible place to ask questions. I would say Reddit or Facebook. But otherwise, you're right.
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Yep! Quora is horrible - and the original post was exactly the sort of thing you get on there. Basically, clickbait. Apart from the link to the article, there was nothing. I'm guessing it was an attempt to get some hits on the article.
If it was a genuine attempt to discuss the merits of calculus, the original poster made zero effort. Opinion - none. Background to article - none. Summary - none. Just stick in the link and send us all off to read it. And - maybe - if the article had had some value, I wouldn't be so  But it didn't. 
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If someone is getting a Computer Science degree to be a computer scientist, then yes they should learn all the math as actual CS is heavily math based, with computer science essentially being a specialized area of mathematics.
However, if someone is getting a CS degree to become a professional software developer, then for most CS jobs you wont need the math, as many of the replies have pointed out.
The biggest issue I see is that somewhere along the way it was decided that to get a job as a developer, a degree in CS (or related field) became required, which is absurd.
What is actually needed is more of a "trade school" for software developers that is accepted by the business community. Coding Boot Camps dont cut it as they are just too short, it should be a couple of years of study at least, but focused on software development, not computer science. Which wont happen - the corporate world has turned university studies into de facto trade schools and they're happy with it being that way. So, people who have no need for 3 years of higher math will continue to have to suffer through it, and we will continue to "weed out" people who would otherwise be fine developers for 80% of the programming jobs out there unnecessarily.
Of course, there are many programming jobs that DO need that level of math, and those are the jobs that should be listing a CS degree as a requirement. Most jobs should not have that requirement though.
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Gjeltema wrote: Computer Science degree ... What is actually needed is more of a "trade school" for software developers that is accepted by the business community.
At least in my experience a CS degree by itself is useless as a measure of someone working as a developer.
What often happens though is that while they are getting that degree they actually get a job through the school which allows them to get paid to program. That experience, not the degree, is what gives them the knowledge to get other jobs.
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Sure they can. Even back in my undergraduate days (82 - 86), my school had two different paths to becoming a "programmer" (using your word). The Computer Engineering degree was in the Engineering department and was identical to the Electrical Engineering degree for the first two years, so calculus physics and chemistry were requirements. The Computer Science degree was in the Arts and Sciences department, and only had some logic-type math class requirements, but no physics nor chemistry per se; they had a breadth requirement for some 100-level science class but they could pick which one. My roommate was a CS and I was a CpE. We both have had very successful careers in "programming."
I've found the most important thing to being a success in programming is the ability to know how to solve problems. Know your problem domain, know what tools and languages are available and what support they give you, know the "usual" approach to solving a related problem, know when to throw out the usual approach, and most importantly, know that you don't know everything.
Be wary of strong drink. It can make you shoot at tax collectors - and miss.
Lazarus Long, "Time Enough For Love" by Robert A. Heinlein
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Exactly
Plus the sheer enjoyment of the job.
As a beginning, entry-level report programmer at a small local Savings & Loan,
many days I left feeling as though I had not worked at all because I was having so much FUN writing (easy) code - AND being paid for it
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I graduated in 2000. I started my freshman year going for a Computer Science degree. After barely passing my math class my first semester, I transferred to the Computer Information Systems degree. I was fortunately that my university offered both. My CIS degree had no additional math requirements. There is a need for both degrees and 24 years later, I'm still slinging business software. The most difficult math I have to do is finding the weighted cost of an item in a shopping cart when applying a credit. I'll never take a job writing gaming engines or tracking real time objects, but I'm okay with that.
Hogan
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Tricky. If the question is should calculus be a prereq for CS, I'd say only if you also want to require some EE background, in which case you need calculus to solve many of those problems. I do think a minimal amount of EE background is worthwhile, even if not critical; at my school you could do CS either as a BS or BA; I chose BS, so I did get the EE prereqs and am a little biased. Otherwise, though, calculus has little direct relevance to CS. Much more relevant would be Boolean logic, or maybe even a philosophy of logic course (it never hurts to hone the verbal skills too, and it trains the mind just as assuredly as pure math study).
All that said, if you take it as a given that intro calc is required, and yet the student can't pass the class, if I were their advisor I'd be concerned. Basic calc may be tough to understand intuitively but is rather easy to apply superficially - which also happens to describe a lot of programming problems. They don't have to be able to prove the fundamental theorem of calculus from scratch, but if they can't at least follow the spoon-fed algorithms for obtaining simple derivatives and integrals, and/or don't have the ability to break down complex problems into smaller ones (and then apply said spoon-fed algorithms), then they might also have a hard time tacking difficult programming problems.
This is nothing unique to calculus vs. other advanced math, though. Like 99% of people who learn any advanced math, it's not about whether they will use it later in life (I've literally never applied calculus in real life, to my recollection). It's about training to, and proving they can, solve complex problems given the tools needed to do so. They don't have to study calculus, or any other specific form of advanced math, to be a good programmer, but if they can't handle it after trying, I'd say it's something that at least should be looked into and understood why not.
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Most everyone else will probably say similar, but if the student goes the business route, the student likely won't need anything more than algebra for many tasks. If the student wants to work for Lockheed Martin, Boeing or write modern video games, then the student should probably master differential equations. Passing calculus is easy. Application of calculus is harder. Of course, I think many gaming engines handle physics for you.
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My math background sucked, largely courtesy of a couple of bad teachers in high school. When I hit university, Computer Science was about computers, languages, and programming. We were taught how computers actually worked, and how to make them dance and sing. Every Comp Sci degree programme I've looked at in the past thirty years looked more like a Math degree than Comp Sci. Our final assignment in my second year Comp Sci course was to write, in assembler, a square root function that was shorter, faster and more robust than the one supplied with the operating system. A real programming problem.
I was already programming before I went to university, and got hired out of it before I finished my degree. I've been working for over 50 years, and I'm still developing systems. I'm in the middle of one right now. My lack of math skills has never stopped me, and my work has included defence systems, operating system maintenance and extension, DLL libraries for various functions, international programming language standards (CODASYL, ISO), and almost every other kind of application you could imagine for everything from mainframes to Windows.
Making a computer dance to your tune doesn't take math -- it takes knowledge of your work, knowledge of the goal, the ability to decompose a problem into its component parts, and the ability to apply software (or database, or other things) to its solution. There's only a very small piece of the programming world that really needs math, and quite often you'll likely find that the mathematician's job is to break the problem into tiny pieces so a real programmer can craft the solution without needing to know the math involved.
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I learned calculus, both differential and integral, as well as linear algebra, Boolean algebra, and set theory. Of the four, Boolean algebra and set theory have been applicable in my nearly 40 years as a software engineer in a business environment.
Some math is needed to help you learn to think critically, but what's more important for software engineers is learning how to separate implementation from specifications, how and when to hide complexity, how computers work at the hardware level, garbage collection techniques along with their benefits and weaknesses, and how to evaluate algorithms for complexity, speed (time), and space (memory) tradeoffs.
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This question does concern me. I became a developer/programmer at the age of around 48. I got a degree in Web Development, but also had a few Java classes. I began my job working with Apex in Salesforce, and with JavaScript, Angular, plus Java/Spring Boot. I am definitely not a great programmer, but I would say I am a decent programmer.
Before I got my Web Dev degree, I took Calculus twice (at around age 46) and withdrew both times rather than finishing with a failing grade. When I was in my 20s getting my first degree (non-computer related), I was Magna Cum Laude. I'm convinced that if I had taken Calculus back then I would have passed it. The Calculus is the reason I went for a Web Dev degree at one school vs a Computer Science degree at another. Now, my job gives us free tuition at the latter school, but I can't take any of the CS courses there until I pass Calculus.
I program without knowing a lot about algorithms, and I think I would probably know more about them if I had a stronger Math background. Whether I would be a better programmer in general is hard to say. I'm just grateful I was able to get into the industry at all at such a late age, and I do have concerns about the future. I think my job is secure, and I hope to retire here, but you never know what life will throw at you.
So I do wish I had succeeded with Calculus, and I hope to at some point. It may or may not help, but it will absolutely never hurt.
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I failed calculus the first time I took it.
It was a combination of my having too easy a time in high school that I did not have good study
habits and a visiting professor who was so unintelligible that the college replaced him after a few weeks.
Higher is needed by computer programmers when they are going to convert a client that uses higher math idea
into code. In my close over 30 years of coding I've never needed to code anything beyond algebra and that was
in cooperation with a math major/computer minor who did the math while I did everything else.
The reality is, even though I took a number of higher level math courses in order to get my degree in computer science, I only remember on bit where I saw how to convert certain math functions into a code type would possibly come in handy.
I'd still recommend higher level math for anyone working with graphics or engineering, but that's more to give you a sanity check when looking at the results of testing to ensure the libraries you are referencing are working correctly and you are correctly accessing them.
For 99%+ of coders out there you won't need much beyond the math used by regular finance people.
I honestly don't know what "maths" the quants use for the stock market, but it might be more exotic
and in line with dot matrix theory or chi squares of the like.
Richard
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