Do programmers need math skills?

Alan Skorkin writes about why he thinks mathematical skills are necessary to be a good developer.

Was some food for thought indeed. I opine that it depends on what you are coding for.Unless you are coding something that is mathematical in its fundamental nature, then logical thinking is most of what you need.

Buried far down the comments of that post, I find a link to this shocking post. Maybe he has a point – perhaps we have grown used to using countless libraries and merely plugging into their APIs, and managing to get things done effectively. Treating functionality from libraries as black boxes, without being curious enough to peek at the inner workings of them from time to time leads to unfamiliarity with the low level stuff. Makes me want to pick up a book on algorithms and data structures or even statistics.

[ via /.]