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Depends what you mean by "know about." I had taken a couple of programming classes. I knew you could write code, compile it, and make a thing that does a thing.

Depends what you mean by "know about." I had taken a couple of programming classes. I knew you could write code, compile it, and make a thing that does a thing. I started college as a Computer Engineering major, then realized that really wasn't what I wanted. If I could go back, and if it existed at the time, I'd to informatics.

kenjackson 16y ago
I ask because if knew nothing going in, you'd learn a fair bit in college. With that said, I'd programmed since 3rd grade and still learned a fair bit in college that I use to this day. Of course, this was pre-internet, so I think it was generally hard to self-teach. But things I learned in college that I used professionally: * Data structures. Before college I pretty much used primitives and arrays. In college I learned to make much better use of trees, graphs, sparse matrices. * OOP. Although in fairness, OOP started to come to life when I was in college. There was no ANSI C at the time :-) * Compilers. I've since built many compilers, but having taken the sequence certainly made it a lot easier. * Databases. Never used a relational DB until college. I think it would be fair to say I've made millions off of them since. :-) * Regular expressions and state machines. This is just ingrained now. * Vi ... Used Vi exclusively for the first decade of my career. * Unix ... Used various Unix variants in the first decade of my career as well. Learned most of it in college. * Architecture and internals -- I've done a fair bit of work at the architectural level, and college is where I laid the foundation for understanding both the architecture (registers, cache, tlbs, pipelines, units, etc..) as well as basic EE. None of which I knew much about before college. There are plenty more, but these are some examples. Probably my big weakness in going in to college is I did all game programming before college. I understood graphics really well and the game loop, But looking back at some of the code, and it was really horrible. You really shouldn't use arrays for everything :-)
- benvanderbeek 16y ago
  I was exposed to all of that, but 1) haven't used much besides Unix/OOP/Databases since, and 2) feel like I only learned 1% of what I use even in those areas during college. A lot of it comes back to not having specific goals in college, sliding by like I always did in school. That, and the excessive my focus on the band I played in. Not that I regret it, but pretty impractical.

kenjackson 16y ago

I ask because if knew nothing going in, you'd learn a fair bit in college. With that said, I'd programmed since 3rd grade and still learned a fair bit in college that I use to this day. Of course, this was pre-internet, so I think it was generally hard to self-teach. But things I learned in college that I used professionally: * Data structures. Before college I pretty much used primitives and arrays. In college I learned to make much better use of trees, graphs, sparse matrices. * OOP. Although in fairness, OOP started to come to life when I was in college. There was no ANSI C at the time :-) * Compilers. I've since built many compilers, but having taken the sequence certainly made it a lot easier. * Databases. Never used a relational DB until college. I think it would be fair to say I've made millions off of them since. :-) * Regular expressions and state machines. This is just ingrained now. * Vi ... Used Vi exclusively for the first decade of my career. * Unix ... Used various Unix variants in the first decade of my career as well. Learned most of it in college. * Architecture and internals -- I've done a fair bit of work at the architectural level, and college is where I laid the foundation for understanding both the architecture (registers, cache, tlbs, pipelines, units, etc..) as well as basic EE. None of which I knew much about before college. There are plenty more, but these are some examples. Probably my big weakness in going in to college is I did all game programming before college. I understood graphics really well and the game loop, But looking back at some of the code, and it was really horrible. You really shouldn't use arrays for everything :-)

benvanderbeek 16y ago
I was exposed to all of that, but 1) haven't used much besides Unix/OOP/Databases since, and 2) feel like I only learned 1% of what I use even in those areas during college. A lot of it comes back to not having specific goals in college, sliding by like I always did in school. That, and the excessive my focus on the band I played in. Not that I regret it, but pretty impractical.