4 ms·

Well, while theoretically you are right, in practice you are saying someone can be a philosopher without knowing how to read and write, it's fundamentally true,

• consteval 2y ago
  Alan Turing was a computer scientist, and he did not care for this. I'd imagine he'd struggle a lot in Microsoft Word. He'd probably catch on fire from pure shock. Computer science is boolean alegra, linear algebra, theory of computation, autonoma, algorithms, and data structures. It's not, necessarily, computer programming. That's just the modern implementation. Naturally schools DO teach computer programming. But past that, not necessarily. I was taught Git and Unix systems, but not every student at every school was. There's pros and cons to this approach. The biggest pro is that, well, tools change. I don't know how to use punch cards. If my education was really focused on that, the practical "do you know the tools" stuff you're talking about, that would suck for me today. The con is that, as you've noticed, some less motivated students barely know how to practically use a computer.
  • kkfx 2y ago
    I understand your point but Alan Turing was from another time when documents was typically handwritten by researchers, studies was only on books, there was no internet and so on, for his era certain "now common tools" was not there. Of course at his time know how to write well was demanded as today typesetting docs is. Again tools changes, but... basic nix environment was born before* me and even if it's changed now an unixer from the early '80s can still operate with a terminal emulator, some tools related to specific devices, now gone, would not be there, but the basic knowledge is still valid and the "adaptation time" for such time traveler would be very quick, just some days, while the "learning time" of many grad students today is some years to really be operational... LaTeX is changed much, but old TeX knowledge from late '80s is pretty valid today, and so on. Old SH is essentially no there anymore, but most sh scripts, ksh ones etc can run with zsh and co with minimum tweaks. The tech change, the tools change, but definitively not that quickly, and most useful and valid tools tend to changes incrementally. > Naturally schools DO teach computer programming. Here in EU yes, unfortunately they tend to teach useless things. They start from the brick chemistry to teach how to build a wall, but never reach the "now that's how to build a wall" even at PhD. Learning how to play with pointers, implement data structure and sorting algorithms is useful if you'll work as a professional programmer for specific tasks, NOT knowing most ecosystems means being unable to write anything useful because just a simple automation to scrape some data would took way too much effort to automate given the basic knowledge. During my network practical exam I have had (circa 2008 I think) a cap file from some ISP router with some traffic analysis to do, I've choose to script in perl a solution, graphs with graphviz I think, my professor told me to re-write it in C++ because he "do not know perl", the script was clean and mostly a wrapper, definitively not something for an encrypted perl contest and he ask C++ not some shell or other high level language, for what? A bunch of system() calls and text manipulations boilerplate? > I was taught Git and Unix systems, but not every student at every school was. So not every student have the basic knowledge to properly works after graduation... Oh, I do not ask for universities as "professional schools" of course, but at least the bare minim who anyway demand YEARS to be learnt enough... Sorry for being so long, my simple point is that most CS students will not be theoretical researchers but sw engineers, generic devs and so on. OK, there is no academic path so far for that but at least the basis should be taught anyway IMVHO.