9 ms·

> It passed all 6/6 test cases with a runtime of 1 ms. Pretty impressive for a prime minister, huh? I do not know the specific background of Mr Lee, but the th

> It passed all 6/6 test cases with a runtime of 1 ms. Pretty impressive for a prime minister, huh? I do not know the specific background of Mr Lee, but the thing I always tell myself is that you can teach programming to a microbiologist, but not microbiology to a programmer.

s-lambert 5y ago
I think it's because programming is not that much of a stretch to the brain if you've done any mathematics and are literate. The brain is used to combining structures through words to create sentences and programming runs along that same path (just more strictly).
bigDinosaur 5y ago
Why can't you teach microbiology to a programmer?
- o_m 5y ago
  - makapuf 5y ago
    Working full-time with brain damaged clients make you brain damaged.
  - mythrwy 5y ago
    Can confirm.
    - oblio 5y ago
      We can't be sure about your confirmation, though.
- ComradePhil 5y ago
  What I have heard from them is that it requires "wet lab experience" to really learn it. Not sure how true it is. If you were to ask me, programmers can't learn it because what they are learning is based on complete misunderstanding of organic chemistry (which has not been updated with the modern understanding of physics)... so it is bound to drive anyone who tries to make sense of it crazy. The only way to learn it is to accept all the rules and ALL the exceptions to the rules as the foundation and go from there, which not a lot of people are willing to do.
  - openknot 5y ago
    > what they are learning is based on complete misunderstanding of organic chemistry (which has not been updated with the modern understanding of physics)... so it is bound to drive anyone who tries to make sense of it crazy This sounds like an extraordinary claim, especially since organic chemists work along physical chemists and chemical physicists who presumably have a strong modern understanding of physics. It would be better for an expert to chime in, but I don’t see the incentive where organic chemists would be content to let their field stay out-of-date.
    - ComradePhil 5y ago
      If you think those who study microbiology study it with quantum chemistry of organic compounds as a foundation, you would be very wrong. I'm not saying they don't exist, I'm just saying it is way more uncommon than you'd think. Ask around your network and find out for yourself.
      - openknot 5y ago
        It looks like I may have parsed your comment in an unintended way. I read it as, roughly: 'To learn microbiology, a programmer must learn organic chemistry as a prerequisite [true for the university I attended]. However, the concepts to study organic chemistry are based on an outdated view of physics, which is why they have so many rules and exceptions.' I believe that any good organic chemist must have strength in physical chemistry (both to excel in the field, plus it's typically a degree requirement), and physical chemists are well-informed of quantum mechanics (also typically a degree requirement, with at least an introduction to QM in most introductory chemistry courses in the unit about atomic bonding). However, it's more plausible to believe the claim (re-interpreted) that many microbiologists don't have a strong foundation in organic chemistry or modern physics. Still, I'm skeptical that those who make it to a tenured professorship can still have these weaknesses, as I'm under the impression that the field is cross-disciplinary with collaborations with biochemists, who can then bring in their stronger background in chemistry (and thus organic chemistry, physical chemistry, and physics). Leading microbiologists (e.g. those tenured at MIT and other top institutions) who influence the field should also have familiarity with these subjects.
- openknot 5y ago
  You absolutely can (an example includes programmers who decide to work in computational biology and learn more biology from textbooks to better understand the job). However, there is a substantial barrier for a programmer to switch careers and become a microbiologist: access to lab equipment. Part of the job of a microbiologist is to work with (usually expensive) scientific equipment to carry out and design procedures for experiments, and it’s hard to study independently without owning a lab space or the equipment. I’ve also found less educational material for self-study online. Contrast this with self-study in programming. The required equipment is also just a low-end computer, and you don’t need a laboratory environment to develop your skillset. Educational resources (e.g. Automate the Boring Stuff With Python) are also not only widely accessible, but often free.
aksss 5y ago
Alternative view: A) any microbiologist may eventually need to learn very basic coding to do their job/tasks effectively; B) a programmer likely won’t be interested in learning even basic microbiology unless hired by microbiologists.
- k_sze 5y ago
  I don’t think B) is necessarily true. I’m a software engineer/programmer by profession and schooling, but I have a life-long fascination with little critters, especially insects, and especially Apocrita and Lepidoptera among insects. I’m an avid participant on iNaturalist and have almost as much reputation on Biology StackExchange as on StackOverflow. I also enjoyed proofreading oncology papers for my brother in law when he was doing his PhD because that stuff is fascinating when you have somebody who can explain it to you. I’m not spending more effort in biology or entomology mainly for three reasons: 1. lack of time, especially since getting married and having kids; 2. lack of mental energy partly due to kids, partly because I’m tired enough fighting inane requirements or some stupid half-assed TypeScript “framework” du jour every day at work; 3. I’m not confident I can make as much money in entomology as in I.T. Lack of interest has never been one of the reasons for me.
  - aksss 5y ago
    Well sure, there’s always a few whose random area of interest might land on microbiology. Most career developers I know are autodidactic obsessives who have no trouble finding fascinating rabbit holes to crawl down. Then life advances, gates close, time gets constrained and you have to pick your passions in life because you can’t do them all. I tried to use the word “likely” to avoid these points being perceived as absolute laws. I think it’s simply less likely that any random programmer will have motivation to learn microbiology than it is for a microbiologist to learn some programming techniques. The microbiologist may be compelled by functional requirements for their job to learn some coding while the programmer, unless working on business problems in that domain, would never be professionally compelled to learn microbiology to reinforce their profession aims.
bajook 5y ago
The specific background of Mr Lee is that he was the Senior Wrangler at Cambridge University (essentially, the top mathematics student in the UK), and was a very promising mathematician who instead chose the family business of running Singapore.
- narrator 5y ago
  It's not a bad business. Senior ministers in Singapore are paid multi-million dollar salaries. According to Transparency International, Singapore is one of the least corrupt countries. I'd guess that's because there's no need for side hustles because the job pays so well.
  - laumars 5y ago
    That doesn’t stop many western CEOs from being corrupt. From what I’ve experienced, the lack of corruption in Singapore is partly cultural and partly due to their heavy penalties for crime.
  - twelvechairs 5y ago
    For all of its many other issues, one thing clear is that Singapore is one of the few countries where being a public servant is a reputable and highly regarded career. It was described to me that Singapore inherited both from both the British public service and the imperial Chinese civil service systems - which have diminished or fallen apart in both of those countries and others which inherited them.
    - throwaway2037 5y ago
      What other countries inherited the Chinese civil service system? Does Taiwan count? I would hardly say it has diminished or fallen apart. Of course, that is only my humble opinion.
      - baybal2 5y ago
        UK civil service was actually modelled after Chinese one after missionaries brought news of how powerful, and well oiled Chinese bureaucratic machine was in comparison to contemporary British one.
Andrew_nenakhov 5y ago
When I was young, I thought that anybody could learn programming. I was horribly, horribly wrong.
- Cthulhu_ 5y ago
  I'm glad this realization exists. When I was in school, I quickly realized that most of my peers - the ones that came with me from an associate's degree course in IT, more sysadmin stuff - just couldn't keep up with software development, they didn't have the knack for it.
- Graffur 5y ago
  I thought this when I was younger too. Now I hate seeing the meme "code is the easy part". There are, of course, other hard parts too but to trivialize coding is silly.
  - Andrew_nenakhov 5y ago
    For the most part, code is, indeed, easy. For you or for me. But some people just can't. I've stopped trying to understand, and just accept is as a fact.
    - aksss 5y ago
      For me, it was “money for nothing”, best job in the world because it was also my hobby. Not everyone is that way. Easy as breathing for some, completely incomprehensible alternate dimension of reality for others.
  - NikolaeVarius 5y ago
    Code is easy, the math is hard.
    - knorker 5y ago
      For many mathematicians code is hard, math is easy.
jptech 5y ago
Just as you can run any program on any machine given enough time and resources (memory), anyone not lacking intellectual ability can learn anything - some quicker, some slower.
- lanstin 5y ago
  The intellectual part maybe but not the praxis. Some confidence, some unwillingness to stop searching for causes, some taste foe elegance, some ability to simulate things in the abstract space of solutions. The combination is as elusive to some as perceiving the mood of a room is to others.
- garbagetime 5y ago
  What makes you think that?
  - jptech 5y ago
    What makes you think otherwise? Some people's brains are wired differently?
    - garbagetime 5y ago
      Yes my understanding is that different people's brains can be wired very differently. Roughly speaking, many areas of the brain require specific stimulus during puberty in order to develop a particular way.
- Cthulhu_ 5y ago
  While I agree that everyone CAN learn anything, it doesn't mean they want to. Motivation is a big factor. And when it comes to software development, the actual writing code part of it, I'm confident you need to have a knack for it. Mind you, there's plenty of jobs in software engineering that don't involve writing code. We're desperately looking for a manager for example, because our current "self-managing" team is far from effective.
vanderZwan 5y ago
Wel gee, sorry that I was hired by a molecular neurobiology research group where all my colleages were at least PhD level biologists and that I didn't manage to catch up to their level in the two years that my contract lasted, dad. At least they appreciated me enough to give me sixth co-authorship on a paper published in Cell, even though I don't understand three-quarters of it. You want to complain that I'm not an Olympiad heart surgeon too? /s, obviously, my dad is actually very proud of me. edit: this attempt at a sarcastic jab pissed some people off I guess. My point was that sure, the critique that issue of "people who understand one thing think they understand everything" applies disproportionately to programmers (and STEM people in general), but trying to defend against that by acting smugly superior about your own domain of expertise isn't going to fix that, that just makes you a problem on the other side of the coin.
- oblio 5y ago
  You probably know where this is headed, but, still: https://xkcd.com/435/ https://xkcd.com/435/
  - vanderZwan 5y ago
    I did but the link is still very welcome :). While we're here we might as well add this complementary SMBC classic: https://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=2556 https://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=2556
jamessb 5y ago
> I do not know the specific background of Mr Lee As an undergraduate, he studied maths at Trinity College Cambridge. Béla Bollobás said [1]: > I certainly taught him more than anybody else in Cambridge. I can truthfully say that he was an exceptionally good student. I’m not sure that this is really known in Singapore. “Because he’s now the Prime Minister,” people may say, “oh, you would say he was good.” No, he was truly outstanding: he was head and shoulders above the rest of the students. He was not only the first, but the gap between him and the man who came second was huge. > I think that he did computer science (after mathematics) mostly because his father didn’t want him to stay in pure mathematics. Loong was not only hardworking, conscientious and professional, but he was also very inventive. All the signs indicated that he would have been a world-class research mathematician. I’m sure his father never realized how exceptional Loong was. He thought Loong was very good. No, Loong was much better than that. When I tried to tell Lee Kuan Yew, “Look, your son is phenomenally good: you should encourage him to do mathematics,” then he implied that that was impossible, since as a top-flight professional mathematician Loong would leave Singapore for Princeton, Harvard or Cambridge, and that would send the wrong signal to the people in Singapore. And I have to agree that this was a very good point indeed. Now I am even more impressed by Lee Hsien Loong than I was all those years ago, and I am very proud that I taught him; he seems to be doing very well. I have come round to thinking that it was indeed good for him to go into politics; he can certainly make an awful lot of difference. He then did the (now-discontinued) Diploma in Computer Science at Cambridge. [1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20180722130213/https://www2.ims.nus.edu.sg/imprints/interviews/BelaBollobas.pdf https://web.archive.org/web/20180722130213/https://www2.ims....
- xvilka 5y ago
  Quite sad he didn't pursue science career, it might have brought a few amazing discoveries to the world.
  - secondaryacct 5y ago
    Instead he rotted as an actor of change, represented his citizens, protected his country and solved sudokus. I dont know if he's good for Singapore but I mean, he did one of the most noble thing a human can do so I wouldnt blame him. I hope to do 1% of what this politician tried to do in my lifetime.
Al-Khwarizmi 5y ago
How much of that is because programming is easier, and how much because for programming there are plenty of free resources (books, tutorials, documentation, etc.) while other disciplines are much more hermetic?
samuel 5y ago
> I do not know the specific background of Mr Lee, but the thing I always tell myself is that you can teach programming to a microbiologist, but not microbiology to a programmer. I don't know if microbiology is special in some sense, but I have witnessed several times during my career cases of programmers turned into domain experts(in Logistics for example). Obviously you don't became an MD that way, if that was your point.
- throwaway2037 5y ago
  Yes, Wall Street (high finance) also has many people (traders & quants & risk controllers) who do not have financial engineering degrees, yet deeply understand the field as practitioners. Some common "alternative" degrees: economics, mathematics, physics, chemistry, microbiology, computer science/engineering. The previous generation was even less specialised -- many had liberal arts degrees!
vmception 5y ago
my university made other hard sciences a prerequisite to a computer science degree so I feel like I learned that topic well enough I see utility in focusing on interdisciplinary skills
gypsyharlot 5y ago
Uh, okay. People like John Carmack (programmer) have proven you wrong.
cm2187 5y ago
On the other hand you can teach finance to a programmer but I had a really hard time teaching finance people to code.
verinus 5y ago
Interesting. Programming yes, Software Development no- imho there is a huge difference between writing compiling code and writing maintainable code and/or designing stable and resiliant systems.
mr_toad 5y ago
> I do not know the specific background of Mr Lee, but the thing I always tell myself is that you can teach programming to a microbiologist, but not microbiology to a programmer. You can’t teach height.
- sethammons 5y ago
  Are you agreeing and saying that learning some skills, like your height, comes from innate genetic wiring - or - Are are you saying that height is something you can't teach and of course anyone can learn microbiology?
knorker 5y ago
Everyone says that about their field, though. In the telco industry I've heard several people say "I think it's easier for someone used to circuit switched to learn packet switched than the other way around". Every single time I heard that was from someone who knew circuit switched, and did not have one single clue about how packet switching worked, but thought they did. If it's your field it's very easy to see people come in and think they've learned it when they haven't. I've seen it in mathematicians, too. They very often think they can program when they can't. Or in other words: You can teach a programmer to be a microbiologist to the point where I will believe they're a microbiologist. But I am not one. And same with programming, except you'll only convince the microbiologist that you succeeded.
pdonis 5y ago
Where are the 6 test cases? I only see one on the leetcode page, but I might be missing something.

s-lambert 5y ago

I think it's because programming is not that much of a stretch to the brain if you've done any mathematics and are literate. The brain is used to combining structures through words to create sentences and programming runs along that same path (just more strictly).

bigDinosaur 5y ago

Why can't you teach microbiology to a programmer?

o_m 5y ago
- makapuf 5y ago
  Working full-time with brain damaged clients make you brain damaged.
- mythrwy 5y ago
  Can confirm.
  - oblio 5y ago
    We can't be sure about your confirmation, though.
ComradePhil 5y ago
What I have heard from them is that it requires "wet lab experience" to really learn it. Not sure how true it is. If you were to ask me, programmers can't learn it because what they are learning is based on complete misunderstanding of organic chemistry (which has not been updated with the modern understanding of physics)... so it is bound to drive anyone who tries to make sense of it crazy. The only way to learn it is to accept all the rules and ALL the exceptions to the rules as the foundation and go from there, which not a lot of people are willing to do.
- openknot 5y ago
  > what they are learning is based on complete misunderstanding of organic chemistry (which has not been updated with the modern understanding of physics)... so it is bound to drive anyone who tries to make sense of it crazy This sounds like an extraordinary claim, especially since organic chemists work along physical chemists and chemical physicists who presumably have a strong modern understanding of physics. It would be better for an expert to chime in, but I don’t see the incentive where organic chemists would be content to let their field stay out-of-date.
  - ComradePhil 5y ago
    If you think those who study microbiology study it with quantum chemistry of organic compounds as a foundation, you would be very wrong. I'm not saying they don't exist, I'm just saying it is way more uncommon than you'd think. Ask around your network and find out for yourself.
    - openknot 5y ago
      It looks like I may have parsed your comment in an unintended way. I read it as, roughly: 'To learn microbiology, a programmer must learn organic chemistry as a prerequisite [true for the university I attended]. However, the concepts to study organic chemistry are based on an outdated view of physics, which is why they have so many rules and exceptions.' I believe that any good organic chemist must have strength in physical chemistry (both to excel in the field, plus it's typically a degree requirement), and physical chemists are well-informed of quantum mechanics (also typically a degree requirement, with at least an introduction to QM in most introductory chemistry courses in the unit about atomic bonding). However, it's more plausible to believe the claim (re-interpreted) that many microbiologists don't have a strong foundation in organic chemistry or modern physics. Still, I'm skeptical that those who make it to a tenured professorship can still have these weaknesses, as I'm under the impression that the field is cross-disciplinary with collaborations with biochemists, who can then bring in their stronger background in chemistry (and thus organic chemistry, physical chemistry, and physics). Leading microbiologists (e.g. those tenured at MIT and other top institutions) who influence the field should also have familiarity with these subjects.
openknot 5y ago
You absolutely can (an example includes programmers who decide to work in computational biology and learn more biology from textbooks to better understand the job). However, there is a substantial barrier for a programmer to switch careers and become a microbiologist: access to lab equipment. Part of the job of a microbiologist is to work with (usually expensive) scientific equipment to carry out and design procedures for experiments, and it’s hard to study independently without owning a lab space or the equipment. I’ve also found less educational material for self-study online. Contrast this with self-study in programming. The required equipment is also just a low-end computer, and you don’t need a laboratory environment to develop your skillset. Educational resources (e.g. Automate the Boring Stuff With Python) are also not only widely accessible, but often free.

aksss 5y ago

Alternative view: A) any microbiologist may eventually need to learn very basic coding to do their job/tasks effectively; B) a programmer likely won’t be interested in learning even basic microbiology unless hired by microbiologists.

k_sze 5y ago
I don’t think B) is necessarily true. I’m a software engineer/programmer by profession and schooling, but I have a life-long fascination with little critters, especially insects, and especially Apocrita and Lepidoptera among insects. I’m an avid participant on iNaturalist and have almost as much reputation on Biology StackExchange as on StackOverflow. I also enjoyed proofreading oncology papers for my brother in law when he was doing his PhD because that stuff is fascinating when you have somebody who can explain it to you. I’m not spending more effort in biology or entomology mainly for three reasons: 1. lack of time, especially since getting married and having kids; 2. lack of mental energy partly due to kids, partly because I’m tired enough fighting inane requirements or some stupid half-assed TypeScript “framework” du jour every day at work; 3. I’m not confident I can make as much money in entomology as in I.T. Lack of interest has never been one of the reasons for me.
- aksss 5y ago
  Well sure, there’s always a few whose random area of interest might land on microbiology. Most career developers I know are autodidactic obsessives who have no trouble finding fascinating rabbit holes to crawl down. Then life advances, gates close, time gets constrained and you have to pick your passions in life because you can’t do them all. I tried to use the word “likely” to avoid these points being perceived as absolute laws. I think it’s simply less likely that any random programmer will have motivation to learn microbiology than it is for a microbiologist to learn some programming techniques. The microbiologist may be compelled by functional requirements for their job to learn some coding while the programmer, unless working on business problems in that domain, would never be professionally compelled to learn microbiology to reinforce their profession aims.

bajook 5y ago

The specific background of Mr Lee is that he was the Senior Wrangler at Cambridge University (essentially, the top mathematics student in the UK), and was a very promising mathematician who instead chose the family business of running Singapore.

narrator 5y ago
It's not a bad business. Senior ministers in Singapore are paid multi-million dollar salaries. According to Transparency International, Singapore is one of the least corrupt countries. I'd guess that's because there's no need for side hustles because the job pays so well.
- laumars 5y ago
  That doesn’t stop many western CEOs from being corrupt. From what I’ve experienced, the lack of corruption in Singapore is partly cultural and partly due to their heavy penalties for crime.
- twelvechairs 5y ago
  For all of its many other issues, one thing clear is that Singapore is one of the few countries where being a public servant is a reputable and highly regarded career. It was described to me that Singapore inherited both from both the British public service and the imperial Chinese civil service systems - which have diminished or fallen apart in both of those countries and others which inherited them.
  - throwaway2037 5y ago
    What other countries inherited the Chinese civil service system? Does Taiwan count? I would hardly say it has diminished or fallen apart. Of course, that is only my humble opinion.
    - baybal2 5y ago
      UK civil service was actually modelled after Chinese one after missionaries brought news of how powerful, and well oiled Chinese bureaucratic machine was in comparison to contemporary British one.

Andrew_nenakhov 5y ago

When I was young, I thought that anybody could learn programming. I was horribly, horribly wrong.

Cthulhu_ 5y ago
I'm glad this realization exists. When I was in school, I quickly realized that most of my peers - the ones that came with me from an associate's degree course in IT, more sysadmin stuff - just couldn't keep up with software development, they didn't have the knack for it.
Graffur 5y ago
I thought this when I was younger too. Now I hate seeing the meme "code is the easy part". There are, of course, other hard parts too but to trivialize coding is silly.
- Andrew_nenakhov 5y ago
  For the most part, code is, indeed, easy. For you or for me. But some people just can't. I've stopped trying to understand, and just accept is as a fact.
  - aksss 5y ago
    For me, it was “money for nothing”, best job in the world because it was also my hobby. Not everyone is that way. Easy as breathing for some, completely incomprehensible alternate dimension of reality for others.
- NikolaeVarius 5y ago
  Code is easy, the math is hard.
  - knorker 5y ago
    For many mathematicians code is hard, math is easy.

jptech 5y ago

Just as you can run any program on any machine given enough time and resources (memory), anyone not lacking intellectual ability can learn anything - some quicker, some slower.

lanstin 5y ago
The intellectual part maybe but not the praxis. Some confidence, some unwillingness to stop searching for causes, some taste foe elegance, some ability to simulate things in the abstract space of solutions. The combination is as elusive to some as perceiving the mood of a room is to others.
garbagetime 5y ago
What makes you think that?
- jptech 5y ago
  What makes you think otherwise? Some people's brains are wired differently?
  - garbagetime 5y ago
    Yes my understanding is that different people's brains can be wired very differently. Roughly speaking, many areas of the brain require specific stimulus during puberty in order to develop a particular way.
Cthulhu_ 5y ago
While I agree that everyone CAN learn anything, it doesn't mean they want to. Motivation is a big factor. And when it comes to software development, the actual writing code part of it, I'm confident you need to have a knack for it. Mind you, there's plenty of jobs in software engineering that don't involve writing code. We're desperately looking for a manager for example, because our current "self-managing" team is far from effective.

vanderZwan 5y ago

Wel gee, sorry that I was hired by a molecular neurobiology research group where all my colleages were at least PhD level biologists and that I didn't manage to catch up to their level in the two years that my contract lasted, dad. At least they appreciated me enough to give me sixth co-authorship on a paper published in Cell, even though I don't understand three-quarters of it. You want to complain that I'm not an Olympiad heart surgeon too? /s, obviously, my dad is actually very proud of me. edit: this attempt at a sarcastic jab pissed some people off I guess. My point was that sure, the critique that issue of "people who understand one thing think they understand everything" applies disproportionately to programmers (and STEM people in general), but trying to defend against that by acting smugly superior about your own domain of expertise isn't going to fix that, that just makes you a problem on the other side of the coin.

oblio 5y ago
You probably know where this is headed, but, still: https://xkcd.com/435/ https://xkcd.com/435/
- vanderZwan 5y ago
  I did but the link is still very welcome :). While we're here we might as well add this complementary SMBC classic: https://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=2556 https://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=2556

jamessb 5y ago

> I do not know the specific background of Mr Lee As an undergraduate, he studied maths at Trinity College Cambridge. Béla Bollobás said [1]: > I certainly taught him more than anybody else in Cambridge. I can truthfully say that he was an exceptionally good student. I’m not sure that this is really known in Singapore. “Because he’s now the Prime Minister,” people may say, “oh, you would say he was good.” No, he was truly outstanding: he was head and shoulders above the rest of the students. He was not only the first, but the gap between him and the man who came second was huge. > I think that he did computer science (after mathematics) mostly because his father didn’t want him to stay in pure mathematics. Loong was not only hardworking, conscientious and professional, but he was also very inventive. All the signs indicated that he would have been a world-class research mathematician. I’m sure his father never realized how exceptional Loong was. He thought Loong was very good. No, Loong was much better than that. When I tried to tell Lee Kuan Yew, “Look, your son is phenomenally good: you should encourage him to do mathematics,” then he implied that that was impossible, since as a top-flight professional mathematician Loong would leave Singapore for Princeton, Harvard or Cambridge, and that would send the wrong signal to the people in Singapore. And I have to agree that this was a very good point indeed. Now I am even more impressed by Lee Hsien Loong than I was all those years ago, and I am very proud that I taught him; he seems to be doing very well. I have come round to thinking that it was indeed good for him to go into politics; he can certainly make an awful lot of difference. He then did the (now-discontinued) Diploma in Computer Science at Cambridge. [1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20180722130213/https://www2.ims.nus.edu.sg/imprints/interviews/BelaBollobas.pdf https://web.archive.org/web/20180722130213/https://www2.ims....

xvilka 5y ago
Quite sad he didn't pursue science career, it might have brought a few amazing discoveries to the world.
- secondaryacct 5y ago
  Instead he rotted as an actor of change, represented his citizens, protected his country and solved sudokus. I dont know if he's good for Singapore but I mean, he did one of the most noble thing a human can do so I wouldnt blame him. I hope to do 1% of what this politician tried to do in my lifetime.

Al-Khwarizmi 5y ago

How much of that is because programming is easier, and how much because for programming there are plenty of free resources (books, tutorials, documentation, etc.) while other disciplines are much more hermetic?

samuel 5y ago

> I do not know the specific background of Mr Lee, but the thing I always tell myself is that you can teach programming to a microbiologist, but not microbiology to a programmer. I don't know if microbiology is special in some sense, but I have witnessed several times during my career cases of programmers turned into domain experts(in Logistics for example). Obviously you don't became an MD that way, if that was your point.

throwaway2037 5y ago
Yes, Wall Street (high finance) also has many people (traders & quants & risk controllers) who do not have financial engineering degrees, yet deeply understand the field as practitioners. Some common "alternative" degrees: economics, mathematics, physics, chemistry, microbiology, computer science/engineering. The previous generation was even less specialised -- many had liberal arts degrees!

vmception 5y ago

my university made other hard sciences a prerequisite to a computer science degree so I feel like I learned that topic well enough I see utility in focusing on interdisciplinary skills

gypsyharlot 5y ago

Uh, okay. People like John Carmack (programmer) have proven you wrong.

cm2187 5y ago

On the other hand you can teach finance to a programmer but I had a really hard time teaching finance people to code.

verinus 5y ago

Interesting. Programming yes, Software Development no- imho there is a huge difference between writing compiling code and writing maintainable code and/or designing stable and resiliant systems.

mr_toad 5y ago

> I do not know the specific background of Mr Lee, but the thing I always tell myself is that you can teach programming to a microbiologist, but not microbiology to a programmer. You can’t teach height.

sethammons 5y ago
Are you agreeing and saying that learning some skills, like your height, comes from innate genetic wiring - or - Are are you saying that height is something you can't teach and of course anyone can learn microbiology?

knorker 5y ago

Everyone says that about their field, though. In the telco industry I've heard several people say "I think it's easier for someone used to circuit switched to learn packet switched than the other way around". Every single time I heard that was from someone who knew circuit switched, and did not have one single clue about how packet switching worked, but thought they did. If it's your field it's very easy to see people come in and think they've learned it when they haven't. I've seen it in mathematicians, too. They very often think they can program when they can't. Or in other words: You can teach a programmer to be a microbiologist to the point where I will believe they're a microbiologist. But I am not one. And same with programming, except you'll only convince the microbiologist that you succeeded.

pdonis 5y ago

Where are the 6 test cases? I only see one on the leetcode page, but I might be missing something.