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> In my experience, algos are the really easy part of programming. His point is that when you design an algorithm you need to be able to reason about why it wo

> In my experience, algos are the really easy part of programming. His point is that when you design an algorithm you need to be able to reason about why it works. Based on the rest of your comments in this thread, it sounds to me like you have something against the mathematical background of CS? Writing code is not the same thing as doing computer science. Plenty of people are perfectly happy doing the former, but CS as an academic discipline is rooted in discrete math so any school that teaches it should also teach the background.

mattmanser 10y ago
Ah, the old "but it's not a programming degree, it's about theory". I thought we were past that these days. Notice how it took you just one sentence to summarise the few hundred words he wrote. We've a fairly big problem in this industry that "qualified" CS graduates don't actually signal anything about their suitability for the profession. A significant chunk can't even fizzbuzz. I'd suggest teaching mathematical models instead of showing loops and recursion in practical code is a large chunk of the problem.
- sornaensis 10y ago
  I don't know how you came to the conclusion that the quality of CS graduates is poor or how that the cause of this perceived lack of quality is somehow due to courses focusing on theory. In my experience very little in a run of the mill CS undergrad program is dedicated to theory so I might come to the opposite conclusion: too many people are focused on learning how to write code with some javascript framework and not how to do computer science. So people miss important patterns and concepts because no one explained to them why they are important. Patterns you have spent years coming to understand intuitively, perhaps.
- gjm11 10y ago
  > it took you one sentence to summarise the few hundred words he wrote. Oh, come on. What sornaensis's one sentence summarizes is ... the one sentence at the start of my comment. It's true that his is shorter; it also gives less information. (For the avoidance of doubt, that isn't a problem. Since you declared yourself unable to understand what I wrote, it's fair enough to try to simplify it.) The rest of what I wrote was (1) an answer to your subsidiary question "What am I missing?" plus (2) an explanation of what I was talking about, in case it was stuff you weren't familiar with. (Of course if I'd known you'd respond as unpleasantly as you did, I wouldn't have bothered trying to be helpful. But at the time I thought you might well be asking a sincere question rather than just wanting to vent about how out of touch those hoity-toity theoreticians are.)

mattmanser 10y ago

Ah, the old "but it's not a programming degree, it's about theory". I thought we were past that these days. Notice how it took you just one sentence to summarise the few hundred words he wrote. We've a fairly big problem in this industry that "qualified" CS graduates don't actually signal anything about their suitability for the profession. A significant chunk can't even fizzbuzz. I'd suggest teaching mathematical models instead of showing loops and recursion in practical code is a large chunk of the problem.

sornaensis 10y ago
I don't know how you came to the conclusion that the quality of CS graduates is poor or how that the cause of this perceived lack of quality is somehow due to courses focusing on theory. In my experience very little in a run of the mill CS undergrad program is dedicated to theory so I might come to the opposite conclusion: too many people are focused on learning how to write code with some javascript framework and not how to do computer science. So people miss important patterns and concepts because no one explained to them why they are important. Patterns you have spent years coming to understand intuitively, perhaps.
gjm11 10y ago
> it took you one sentence to summarise the few hundred words he wrote. Oh, come on. What sornaensis's one sentence summarizes is ... the one sentence at the start of my comment. It's true that his is shorter; it also gives less information. (For the avoidance of doubt, that isn't a problem. Since you declared yourself unable to understand what I wrote, it's fair enough to try to simplify it.) The rest of what I wrote was (1) an answer to your subsidiary question "What am I missing?" plus (2) an explanation of what I was talking about, in case it was stuff you weren't familiar with. (Of course if I'd known you'd respond as unpleasantly as you did, I wouldn't have bothered trying to be helpful. But at the time I thought you might well be asking a sincere question rather than just wanting to vent about how out of touch those hoity-toity theoreticians are.)