Ask HN: I've been a programmer for 6 years, and I can't solve basic CS problems

Post by anyfoo » Wed, Nov 14, 2018, 1:48 AM UTC

peterwwillis wrote: post #46

topkai22 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This remains a serious problem on my team- Over half my team members don’t have CS degrees. They get an enormous amount done, but there is often a perf or maintainability cost. I have no intention of swapping them out because they ultimately provide enormous value, but it’s noticeable.

Is it the algorithmic efficiency that's the problem, or the ability to scale the application? I've seen things some people wouldn't believe. mod_perl 1.4 on Apache 2.0 handling 350,000 hps dynamic traffic on twenty archaic 1U's. Five tiers of caching, serialized objects on local disks, NFS in production. C-beams glittering in the dark near the Tannhäuser gate. Who cares about inefficiency if it scales?

Post by Jedi72 » Wed, Nov 14, 2018, 1:52 AM UTC

hmmk wrote: post #44

cs0 wrote: post #31

Thank you to everyone who has replied to my rant. I felt of low value for not being able to provide immediate help for most of the problems that she's being taught to work on. Some of the examples (since some of you were asking for them): https://github.com/cs50/docs/blob/master/_pages/2018/x/psets... https://github.com/cs50/docs/blob/master/_pages/2018/x/psets... I realise that I may have written my original post a…

What exactly did you have trouble with? These really are simple problems, all you need are an understanding of loops, ASCII character codes, and basic arithmetic. To be honest, I'm surprised a seasoned developer of 5+ years can't do these, or at least have a decent stab at them.

Post by commandlinefan » Wed, Nov 14, 2018, 1:56 AM UTC

guitarbill wrote: post #17

swatcoder wrote: post #10

Think of it this way: application development, software engineering, and computer science (and data science and ... etc) sometimes use the same tools but are all different disciplines. Universities traditionally focused on Computer Science and their graduates would often need a lot of grooming before they could really be independently and reliably productive in the commercial words of application development or softw…

seconding this, creating value is orthogonal to knowing CS. see the creator of homebrew, Max Howell infamously failing to invert a binary tree in an interview: https://mobile.twitter.com/mxcl/status/608682016205344768?la...

Post by commandlinefan » Wed, Nov 14, 2018, 1:58 AM UTC

cs0 wrote: post #31

Thank you to everyone who has replied to my rant. I felt of low value for not being able to provide immediate help for most of the problems that she's being taught to work on. Some of the examples (since some of you were asking for them): https://github.com/cs50/docs/blob/master/_pages/2018/x/psets... https://github.com/cs50/docs/blob/master/_pages/2018/x/psets... I realise that I may have written my original post a…

Post by edflsafoiewq » Wed, Nov 14, 2018, 2:02 AM UTC

samfisher83 wrote: post #14

haney wrote: post #12

I heard somewhere that a computer science degree is actually a history degree in how we have solved problems in the past. Programming is a creative problem solving process, but certain problems took decades to solve and it’s only by knowing the history that people are able to resolve some of these hard problems. Don’t beat yourself up for not knowing all of history and give yourself a break for not being able to imme…

Knowing things like binary trees, heaps, B-trees, queues etc. are not history. They are fundamental to writing applications. Using one data structure or a particular sort method will make your application much faster. Supposed you have had a billion elements to sort, but you knew every element in that array is between 1-100. I mean a bucket sort would be much much faster than using a quick sort.

    hist = [0]*100
    for x in xs:
        hist[x-1] += 1