this post was submitted on 17 Jun 2025
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Science Memes

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Meme of two women fighting while a man smokes from a pipe in the background.

The women fighting are labeled "mathematicians defining pi" and "engineers just using 3 because it's within tolerance"

The man smoking is labeled "astrophysicists" and the pipe is labeled "pi = 1"

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[–] [email protected] 17 points 5 days ago (2 children)

And then you’re using C++ and they scold you for including cmath for just M_PI because it increases compilation times.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 5 days ago (2 children)

We're talking about engineers here! We're using MATLAB or Python if we're programming at all.

[–] [email protected] 34 points 5 days ago (3 children)

Your not writing regular python code, your writing a special subset of python intended for engineers and scientists called "bad python code"

[–] [email protected] 8 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (1 children)

My code is not intended to be run by any idiots but myself! Anyways why can't i make sense of what i have written just a month ago?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 days ago

As a comp sci that interacts a lot with engineers, I feel this in my soul.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago)

Your not writing

Coder/engineer confirmed.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 5 days ago (1 children)

You can't say that for all engineers. I'm one and the biggest part of my job is programming in C++

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 days ago (1 children)

Just wanted to say something similar. Any low latency high frequency code is written in c++, c or assembler. And that’s engineers work usually.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 days ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Still want to try rust but in my field it’s just not established enough unfortunately. But I love the idea of the language.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 days ago

honestly, my rust comment was mostly a joke; rust is great for it, but its readability is really bad. i'm not a huge fan of writing/reading it, just using it.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (1 children)

As they should, if that's the only thing you are using it for, don't introduce a whole header file, just put the following in the constants.h or equivalent that the proj for sure has:

#define M_PI   3.14159265358979323846264338327950288

Yes, it's literally what math.h has defined.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 days ago

If I'm not completely mistaken M_PI is not part of the C standard, so depending on your stdlib or compiler or even compiler flags you will have to define it yourself even in C.