25 ms·

I wish the hundreds (or even thousands) of hours from all those people wouldn't be wasted solving the same didactically useful but rather useless results of man

I wish the hundreds (or even thousands) of hours from all those people wouldn't be wasted solving the same didactically useful but rather useless results of manual work. Why can't the manual labour put in result into something great or useful like a working program, framework, bugfix, codechallenge (I surely am fantasizing a bit here but you get the idea)? That was always something that bugged me about doing CS as an undergrad (and grad): all those hours of brainpower are wasted solving the same problem instead of looking at the final result from all the lessons and picking the best out of each assignment and having that at least run against last year's class. Education surely is ripe for disruption and this would be one way to make use of the larger scale of having a larger number of people work on problem sets.

tikhonj 15y ago
This is largely because the beginning hours of work in any field--coding in general or some specialist programming--are remarkably inefficient. At the very start, everybody inevitably writes poor code slowly. It is more efficient to optimize the learning and try to get people productive quickly than trying to keep them productive throughout. All the undergrad courses--as far as I can tell--are just introductions to some field or other. Once you get to grad school--and some during undergrad too--you start doing research. This is productive while being didactic; however, I doubt it would be nearly as efficient without the useless classes before it. In short, while learning you're just solving known problems poorly (that compiler you wrote for your class was probably not comparable to GCC :). The stuff that actually needs to get done and the things you need to do while starting learning are unfortunately different.
jeffreymcmanus 15y ago
Because the activities involved in learning stuff and creating stuff are divergent -- even conflicting at times.

tikhonj 15y ago

This is largely because the beginning hours of work in any field--coding in general or some specialist programming--are remarkably inefficient. At the very start, everybody inevitably writes poor code slowly. It is more efficient to optimize the learning and try to get people productive quickly than trying to keep them productive throughout. All the undergrad courses--as far as I can tell--are just introductions to some field or other. Once you get to grad school--and some during undergrad too--you start doing research. This is productive while being didactic; however, I doubt it would be nearly as efficient without the useless classes before it. In short, while learning you're just solving known problems poorly (that compiler you wrote for your class was probably not comparable to GCC :). The stuff that actually needs to get done and the things you need to do while starting learning are unfortunately different.

jeffreymcmanus 15y ago

Because the activities involved in learning stuff and creating stuff are divergent -- even conflicting at times.