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I agree with the point of this article, and I find this quite ennoying. The problem is not that a single individual cannot master everything but that the rewar

I agree with the point of this article, and I find this quite ennoying. The problem is not that a single individual cannot master everything but that the reward for learning a part of the book pile becomes lower and lower in proportion to the required effort. This trend is clearly discouraging students to "jump" in some of these fundamental reference books. And teachers find it probably very difficult to provide applied exercises for their theoretical teaching. "Which do you choose ? How do you know which one will be useful in 5 years ?" My suggestion is that academia standardize in a virtual machine, like what Knuth started to do with MIX and MMIX. these VM can provide a stable, simpler target to help students and professionnals to enjoy "more complete understanding". I expect this to make learning a lot more fun. When there is a clear breakthrough in technology (like multicore systems), then a new version of the VM can be specified. This can help to improve communication between academia and the real world : btw MMIX was specified with input from experienced chip archicture designers.

tluyben2 15y ago
If you learn the basics well (of logic, hardware, functional programming, imperative programming etc) (and by well I do not mean a bit of practical tinkering; I mean a few years of studying theoretical foundations in-depth and applying those on several non-trivial practical cases), this will be useful in 5 years. It will be useful the rest of your life. My theoretical foundations in CS, AI, Math (esp discrete) and physics from the late 80s/begin 90s allow me to read cutting edge papers (memristors, spintronics), learn new languages fast, read 'modern' source code and understand modern hardware architectures. This is 'knowledge' from 20 years ago; not that much has changed tbh on low levels. Actually ; my dad enjoyed his education under Dijkstra in Eindhoven (and others, but this I now find cool :) and he also understands hardware and software on a low level after almost 50 years. I don't see this panicky 'what you learn is obsolete when you finish uni'; might be for some studies, but for math/physics/cs it definitely isn't (again IFF the education is not flaky; there are plenty uni's I know of which are teaching CS courses which are WAY too practical ; students coming from there 'know' C# and find it very hard to do anything else. That's not a solid foundation at all. Example; university of Dubai.).

tluyben2 15y ago

If you learn the basics well (of logic, hardware, functional programming, imperative programming etc) (and by well I do not mean a bit of practical tinkering; I mean a few years of studying theoretical foundations in-depth and applying those on several non-trivial practical cases), this will be useful in 5 years. It will be useful the rest of your life. My theoretical foundations in CS, AI, Math (esp discrete) and physics from the late 80s/begin 90s allow me to read cutting edge papers (memristors, spintronics), learn new languages fast, read 'modern' source code and understand modern hardware architectures. This is 'knowledge' from 20 years ago; not that much has changed tbh on low levels. Actually ; my dad enjoyed his education under Dijkstra in Eindhoven (and others, but this I now find cool :) and he also understands hardware and software on a low level after almost 50 years. I don't see this panicky 'what you learn is obsolete when you finish uni'; might be for some studies, but for math/physics/cs it definitely isn't (again IFF the education is not flaky; there are plenty uni's I know of which are teaching CS courses which are WAY too practical ; students coming from there 'know' C# and find it very hard to do anything else. That's not a solid foundation at all. Example; university of Dubai.).