Fourg
this post was submitted on 18 Dec 2025
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Some programming languages do away with operator precedence for a big parsing speed boost. J/APL and stack languages are "best known". in J, right to left parsing,
16 = 4 * 2 + 2
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8x + 2
The annoying prevalence of this meme suggests to me that an alarming number of people lack even a middle-school understanding of basic arithmetic.
Wait until you hear what the average reading level is.
It's not arithmetic at all, it's just about convention aka how to communicate math. The author didn't make themselves clear enough so people misunderstand what calculation they mean.
In mathematics and computer programming, the order of operations is a collection of conventions about which arithmetic operations to perform first in order to evaluate a given mathematical expression.
The order of operations is part of arithmetic. Although, the memes about it are certainly not good mathematics communication.
There's a useful distinction to be made. The order of operations is different between conventional written maths, calculators, reverse polish notation, python, etc. In contrast there is no disagreement over what the result of any individual binary operations is
PEMDAS isn’t even real. It’s something we made up to make stupid people feel better about being poor communicators. I challenge someone to create a word problem that actually requires the use of pemdas where you couldn’t just reword the problem to actually make sense.
Creating fake problems by inserting ambiguity is ridiculous.
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Let's just agree to disagree, then. /s
That 10 guy is totally biased.
We should hear from both sides.
I say we vote on it. Oh, wait. /s
Not with that attitude it's not!?!
(Americans be like: skill issue, git guud)
In america, math IS a democracy, and this is why we are losing our democracy.
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SADMEP
Maybe it was addressed at Smalltalk programmers. 😉
I'm worried how many people answered the odd numbers for an equation where it is only possible to end up with an even numbered answer.
I'm guessing the 13 results are from people who just picked the closest number to the correct one.
I'm guessing someone photoshopped some blue bars. I'm not convinced anyone really answered it. Or if they did why? What were the stakes?
If i were to be paid to answer a stupid questions, I'd gladly give a stupid answers all day long. I don't think that's a stupid thing to do - the stupid thing is to ask the question. In fact that is about half of my real job.
So people just assumed an imaginary parentheses?
Parenthesis, Powers(exponents), Multiplication, Division, Addition, Subtraction is the order of mathematics.
Yes, that’s why I was asking why 59% just assumed there were parentheses in the equation.
I see your thinking now. I thought you might not remember that multiplication, division comes before addition, subtraction and were just doing right to left operations.
Didn't really understand how the imaginary parenthesis came in.
*is a common convention
Technically it can be, since PEMDAS is not an immutable law, it's convention so we can communicate maths and come to the same answer.
At least twice now I've had math nerds get really mad when I suggested "if people are misreading it, add parentheses". Very much skinner "it's the children who are out of touch".
Some people would rather be right than understood, I guess.
No one's going to die because you write x = c + (a * b) even though those parentheses aren't strictly needed.
BEDMAS is just as immutable as the idea that those symbols represent numbers and operations. All math is based on conventions; you can't just decide that some are more important than others.
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