> Programming should be taught as a combination of theoretical computer science, mathematics, and applied applications, which is already is in many places. I t

> Programming should be taught as a combination of theoretical computer science, mathematics, and applied applications, which is already is in many places. I think that someone should learn from theory and from the ground up. I could not agree more. This was my university experience. I will say that the most 'useless classes^1' I took were the most important to my career. These 'useless classes' were classes like Assembly Programming, Digital Logic, Discrete Math, Algorithms & DS, and perhaps Linear Algebra. Taking Discrete Math/Digital Logic straight into Assembly was the wombo-combo in which everything "clicked" for me. I think I really benefited from seeing things operated at a low-level and the theory behind how the low-levels worked. With current high-level languages being so abstracted from low-level programming, I feel like a lot is missed when skipping out on the lower level languages. [1] Obviously, I do not think those subjects were 'useless classes.' However, that is the attitude a lot of my peers had lead me to believe because I would commonly read or hear things like, "Who cares how to sort a string? Just use .reverse()" or "Digital logic / Math is useless. I want to be a programmer and not a(n) electrical/computer engineer."