Breaking backwards compatiblity

[H. S. Teoh]

On Mon, Mar 12, 2012 at 01:36:06AM -0400, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
> "H. S. Teoh" <hsteoh at quickfur.ath.cx> wrote in message 
> news:mailman.510.1331520028.4860.digitalmars-d at puremagic.com...
[...]
> Personally, I found discrete math to be the easiest class I took since
> kindergarten (*Both* of the times they made me take discrete math.
> Ugh. God that got boring.) It was almost entirely the sorts of things
> that any average coder already understands intuitively. Like
> DeMorgan's: I hadn't known the name "DeMorgan", but just from growing
> up writing "if" statements I had already grokked how it worked and how
> to use it. No doubt in my mind that *all* of us here have grokked it
> (even any of us who might not know it by name) *and* many of the
> coworkers I've had who I'd normally classify as "incompetent VB-loving
> imbiciles".

It's not that I didn't already know most of the stuff intuitively, I
found that, in retrospect, having to learn it formally helped to
solidify my mental grasp of it, and to be able to analyse it abstractly
without being tied to intuition. This later developed into the ability
to reason about other stuff in the same way, so you could *derive* new
stuff yourself in similar ways.


> Then there was Pidgeonhole principle, which was basically just obvious
> corollaries to preschool-level spacial relations. Etc.  All pretty
> much BASIC-level stuff.

Oh reeeeaally?! Just wait till you learn how the pigeonhole principle
allows you to do arithmetic with infinite quantities... ;-)

(And before you shoot me down with "infinite quantities are not
practical in programming", I'd like to say that certain non-finite
arithmetic systems actually have real-life consequences in finite
computations. Look up "Hydra game" sometime. Or "Goldstein sequences" if
you're into that sorta thing.)


[...]
> > However, I also found that most big-name colleges are geared toward
> > producing researchers rather than programmers in the industry.
> 
> The colleges I've seen seemed to have an identity crisis in that
> regard: Sometimes they acted like their role was teaching theory,
> sometimes they acted like their role was job training/placement, and
> all the time they were incompetent at both.

In my experience, I found that the quality of a course depends a LOT on
the attitude and teaching ability of the professor. I've had courses
which were like mind-openers every other class, where you just go "wow,
*that* is one heck of a cool algorithm!".

Unfortunately, (1) most professors can't teach; (2) they're not *paid*
to teach (they're paid to do research), so they regard it as a tedious
chore imposed upon them that takes away their time for research. This
makes them hate teaching, and so most courses suck.


[...]
> I once made the mistake of signing up for a class that claimed to be
> part of the CS department and was titled "Optimization Techniques". I
> thought it was obvious what it was and that it would be a great class
> for me to take.  Turned out to be a class that, realistically,
> belonged in the Math dept and had nothing to do with efficient
> software, even in theory. Wasn't even in the ballpark of Big-O, etc.
> It was linear algebra with large numbers of variables.

Ahhhhahahahahaha... must've been high-dimensional polytope optimization
stuff, I'll bet. That stuff *does* have its uses... but yeah, that was a
really dumb course title.

Another dumb course title that I've encountered was along the lines of
"computational theory" where 95% of the course talks about
*uncomputable* problems. You'd think they would've named it
"*un*computational theory". :-P


> I'm sure it would be great material for the right person, but it
> wasn't remotely what I expected given the name and department of the
> course.  (Actually, similar thing with my High School class of
> "Business Law" - Turned out to have *nothing* to do with business
> whatsoever. Never understood why they didn't just call the class "Law"
> or "Civic Law".) Kinda felt "baited and switched" both times.
[...]

That's why I always took the effort read course descriptions VERY
carefully before I sign up. It's like the fine print in contracts. You
skip over it at your own peril.

(Though, that didn't stop me from taking "Number Theory". Or "Set
Theory". Both of which went wayyyyyy over my head for the most part.)


T

-- 
2+2=4. 2*2=4. 2^2=4. Therefore, +, *, and ^ are the same operation.