Biden administration calls for developers to embrace memory-safe programing languages and move away from those that cause buffer overflows and other memory access vulnerabilities.

  • @thisfro@slrpnk.net
    link
    fedilink
    24 months ago

    Average is the mean (i.e. sum of all “skill” divided by the amount of programmers)

    What they were thinking of is the median (50th percentile = 0.5 quantile), which splits the group in two equal sized groups.

    For a bell curve, they are the same values. But think of the example of average incomes: 9 people have an income of 10$, one has an income of 910$. The average income is 100$ ((10*9+910)/10). The median is basically 10 however.

    • @Bademantel@feddit.de
      link
      fedilink
      44 months ago

      The distribution of skill in humans, for various tasks and abilities, can often be approximated by a normal distribution. In that case, as you know, the mean is equal to the average.

      • @burlemarx@lemmygrad.ml
        link
        fedilink
        14 months ago

        Actually, in order to test your assumption, you’d need to quantitatively measure skill, which per se is something already problematic, but you’d also need to run a statistical test to confirm the distribution is a normal/Gaussian distribution. People always forget the latter and often produce incorrect statistical inferences.