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people keep telling me algorithms are important but they mean "rote memorization as a proxy for skill is what got me hired"
i have seen what a computer science education does to a regular human mind and i cannot say it makes people better at programming
let& #39;s teach people to work in isolation on trivial problems but force them to use unnecessary abstractions to demonstrate knowlege
everytime someone says math is important or algorithms is important i always hear "i think learning these things gives me status"
what& #39;s the hardest problem in programming? knowledge transfer, and absolutely no-one comes out of a cs course a better communicator
here& #39;s the thing: a disciplined approach to problem solving is something you& #39;ll need in almost any role, but cs won& #39;t teach that
congratulations on writing down a polynomial to represent how many nested for loops you have. now run a profiler
well? first we ignore the cache. then we ignore out of order execution. then we pretend the average is a useful way of measuring speed
see also: the people who whine about ~garbage collector pauses~ and ignore all the asymptotic runtime costs of a resizable array
"you have to know algorithms to know what the computer is doing" do you know what the computer is doing "no"
full disclaimer: i& #39;m the sort of nerd who gets really into algorithms, i just think other skills take center stage
giving this thread a peck on the cheek, and a packed lunch too, as I mute it and send it on its way to the internet
