Breaking backwards compatiblity

H. S. Teoh hsteoh at quickfur.ath.cx
Sun Mar 11 19:42:00 PDT 2012


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

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