Go rant

[bearophile]

Walter Bright:
> I suppose I'm alone in thinking that engineering school should also 
> cover designs that don't work and explain why!

Knuth doesn't say it's uselsss to teach Bubble sort. Knowing bad algorithms is useful if they are both obvious and slow, to know the basics and to avoid them.
And learning what Bubble Sort is, is useful to learn other things, like the Kendal Tau distance, for example:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kendall_tau_distance

Bye,
bearophile