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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[–] AmazingAwesomator@lemmy.world 0 points 17 hours ago (2 children)

as an engineer, a lot of languages (even proprietary ones) have a built-in constant pi variable because it is so ubiquitous - its easier and more readable to use pi than 3........

[–] I_Has_A_Hat@lemmy.world 0 points 8 hours ago

I've also never seen a fellow engineer simplify pi to just 3, although I have seen a rise of memes from people who think they do.

I would slap someone if I saw them try that, it's unnecessarily sloppy. 3.14 is the default, and trivial to work with if you're using a calculator (I would also slap someone if I saw them not using a calculator). Unless you just LIKE having all your calculations be off by almost 5%. Then you'll come back wondering why so many of your parts are out of tolerance.

[–] Mad_Punda@feddit.org 0 points 15 hours 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.

[–] fushuan@lemmy.blahaj.zone 0 points 11 hours ago* (last edited 11 hours ago)

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.

[–] Telemachus93@slrpnk.net 0 points 15 hours ago (2 children)

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

[–] abbadon420@lemm.ee 0 points 15 hours ago (2 children)

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

[–] Saleh@feddit.org 0 points 10 hours ago* (last edited 10 hours 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?

[–] fushuan@lemmy.blahaj.zone 0 points 11 hours ago

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

[–] Courantdair@jlai.lu 0 points 14 hours 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++

[–] Evilschnuff@feddit.org 0 points 11 hours 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.

[–] AmazingAwesomator@lemmy.world 0 points 8 hours ago (1 children)
[–] Evilschnuff@feddit.org 0 points 3 hours ago

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