(This article was originally published at Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science, and syndicated at StatsBlogs.)
This came up in a recent discussion thread, I can’t remember exactly where. A commenter pointed out, correctly, that you shouldn’t require computer programming as a prerequisite for a statistics course: there’s lots in statistics that can be learned without knowing how to program. Sure, if you can program you can do a better job of statistics, but you can still do a bit with just point and click.
Here’s what I will say, though:
In the twentieth century, it was said that if you wanted to do statistics, you had to be a bit of a mathematician, whether you want to or not. In the twenty-first century, if you want to do statistics, you have to be a bit of a programmer, whether you want to or not.
So, sure, no need to learn programming before you take that statistics course. No need to learn math, either. If you had to choose between them, I’d choose programming. Better to have both, though. Programming and math are both useful. Programming’s more useful, but math helps too.
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