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'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's the hardest problem in programming? knowledge transfer, and absolutely no-one comes out of a cs course a better communicator

here's the thing: a disciplined approach to problem solving is something you'll need in almost any role, but cs won'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'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