On 12 March 2012 15:42, H. S. Teoh <hst...@quickfur.ath.cx> wrote: > On Sun, Mar 11, 2012 at 03:32:39PM -0400, Nick Sabalausky wrote: > [...] >> I'm convinced that colleges in general produce very bad programmers. >> The good programmers who have degrees, for the most part (I'm sure >> there are rare exceptions), are the ones who learned on their own, not >> in a classroom. It's sad that society brainwashes people into >> believing the opposite. > [...] > > I have a master's degree in computer science. About 90% (perhaps 95%) of > what I do at my day job is stuff I learned on my own outside the > classroom. That is not to say the classroom is completely worthless, > mind you; courses like discrete maths and programming logic did train me > to think logically and rigorously, an indispensible requirement in the > field. > > However, I also found that most big-name colleges are geared toward > producing researchers rather than programmers in the industry. Now I > don't know if this applies in general, but the curriculum I was in was > so geared towards CS research rather than doing real industry work > (i.e., write actual programs!) that we spent more time studying > uncomputable problems than computable ones. > > OK, so knowing what isn't computable is important so that you don't > waste time trying to solve the halting problem, for example. But when > *most* (all?) of your time is spent contemplating the uncomputable, > wouldn't you say that you're a bit too high up in that ivory tower? I > mean, this is *computer science*, not *uncomputable science* we're > talking about. > > Case in point. One of the courses I took as a grad student was taught by > none less than Professor Cook himself (y'know the guy behind Cook's > Theorem). He was a pretty cool guy, and I respect him for what he does. > But the course material was... I don't remember what the official course > title was, but we spent the entire term proving stuff about proofs. Let > me say that again. I'm not just talking about spending the entire > semester proving math theorems (which is already questionable enough in > a course that's listed as a *computer science* course). I'm talking > about spending the entire semester proving things *about* math proofs. > IOW, we were dealing with *meta-proofs*. And most of the "proofs" we > proved things about involved *proofs of infinite length*. > > Yeah. > > I spent the entire course repeatedly wondering if I had misread the > course calendar and gone to the wrong class, and, when I had ruled that > out, what any of this meta-proof stuff had to do with programming. > > > T > > -- > Recently, our IT department hired a bug-fix engineer. He used to work > for Volkswagen.
I'm entirely self-taught, and currently taking a break from university (too much debt, not enough time, too much stress). I rarely use stuff that I haven't taught myself. I realize now that trying to teach people how to program is very, very hard however, since I always think about how to teach stuff I know. Ideally you'd learn everything at once and spend the next 2 years re-arranging it in your brain, but unfortunately people don't work like that... -- James Miller