Skimming through the pages on the video, it shows vividly how far away academia is from real life problems.
That's not necessarily a bad thing. This is Computer Science and not Computer Engineering after all.
Professor solves 240 computer science exam problems in 4 hours [video]
81–90 of 173 posts
Re: Professor solves 240 computer science exam problems in 4 hours [video]
#82I need to defend theory of computer science here, it seems. Please note that this computer science , not computer engineering . The idea of automata, regular languages, turing machines, and whatnot inform some of the most fundamental results of computer science . At least in the fields where I work [compilers, formal verification], all of the above theory is common parlance. Everyone working on this stuff knows all o…
Some people are more inclined to theoretical concepts, some people are more practical. Both have an understanding on how things work and/or an intuition, either by studying theoretical concepts or via practical, hands on experience. My issue with this, and this is mostly my own personal opinion, is not whether or not this subject is important and that we need to defend it, but whether teaching it to students of that…
There are schools which just teach you programming and computer skills and do a good job at it. But companies will still prefer candidates with computer science degrees, or even outright require a CS degree, even for simple programming jobs that really don't need one. The degree is used as no more than an intelligence filter. This relegates anyone who has a practically oriented degree to being regarded as a second class programmer, the perception being that you would have studied CS instead if you had the ability.
This completely sucks for practically inclined people who are forced to trudge through a theoretical degree that doesn't interest them, and where 90% of the material they will never use, just to prove that they're smart enough.
They then tend to blame academia for being out of touch, ivory tower, etc. But academia is not at fault here, they are teaching what they claim to teach: computer science. There are good pratically minded degrees which prepare you just fine for the average programming job, it's employers who constantly signal that they value CS degrees more.
Re: Professor solves 240 computer science exam problems in 4 hours [video]
#83Re: Professor solves 240 computer science exam problems in 4 hours [video]
#84Interesting how so many of these problems are probably hard for a fraction of the people that want to pass this exam simply because of the language in which they are expressed. For example, and I've noticed this pattern with some regularity: large and complex expression in a paper or some other document. Actual implementation: one or more for loops with an add or a multiply in the body of the loop with some initializ…
That's an excellent question! It may be worth considering that the answer may not be as significant as some might guess. GATE is an exam that tests if you're ready for graduate school. Part of being ready for a specialized field is being fluent in the vocabulary and parlance used in that field, as this enables rapid learning and smooths communication. That you can understand the ideas if they are restated and re-expr…
But do those fields have a similar split between the language used by the theoretical and the practical side of things?
Re: Professor solves 240 computer science exam problems in 4 hours [video]
#85Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's an excellent question! It may be worth considering that the answer may not be as significant as some might guess. GATE is an exam that tests if you're ready for graduate school. Part of being ready for a specialized field is being fluent in the vocabulary and parlance used in that field, as this enables rapid learning and smooths communication. That you can understand the ideas if they are restated and re-expr…
But do those fields have a similar split between the language used by the theoretical and the practical side of things?
Generally no, because they do not have large populations of self-taught professional practitioners who never learned theory.
Least common denominator writing is very useful for a great many things. It is wonderful and ideally suited for items aimed at a popular audience. It just may not always be ideal for efficient and precise technical communication.
Re: Professor solves 240 computer science exam problems in 4 hours [video]
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah! And why come we gots to teach kid how to plus and minus if theys just gonna be a plummer?
I think you are not addressing the point, which the GP tried to make. It's not about teaching or not teaching, but about the time when stuff is taught. Surely all these things have their time and place. Perhaps there are gentler introductions to some of these topics available?
If you can't teach theoretical computer science to undergraduate computer science students, you will have to shift it to the graduate level. Which means you won't really every have anyone earning a true masters in computer science because they'll need so much grounding to be able to complete the work they won't have time to do anything novel.
Re: Professor solves 240 computer science exam problems in 4 hours [video]
#87I need to defend theory of computer science here, it seems. Please note that this computer science , not computer engineering . The idea of automata, regular languages, turing machines, and whatnot inform some of the most fundamental results of computer science . At least in the fields where I work [compilers, formal verification], all of the above theory is common parlance. Everyone working on this stuff knows all o…
> The fact that one does not need this during their day job is, dare I say it, irrelevant.
I disagree for some of the fundamental things.
Binary arithmetic is fundamental. The number of times I have seen people using addition for logical-or and being confounded by bugs astounds me. I don't expect you to be able to do stupid bit tricks. However you must know how to use and,or,xor,not for masking and you must understand what integer overflow/underflow is.
State machines are fundamental. I'll go so far as to say that if you don't know how to do state machines, you don't really know how to program. You simply have no framework for understanding things like protocols, sequencing, concurrency, etc.
Data structures are fundamental. Sure, I can boil it down to "75% of the time use a hash table; 25% of the time use a vector; .001% of the time use something else". But you won't know when you shouldn't use something.
These are things I see all the time in programmers who I would expect to know better. These also seem to be things that "programming" course often slack on--they're hard to teach and hard to learn. It requires work from both sides to communicate the concepts.
Re: Professor solves 240 computer science exam problems in 4 hours [video]
#88I need to defend theory of computer science here, it seems. Please note that this computer science , not computer engineering . The idea of automata, regular languages, turing machines, and whatnot inform some of the most fundamental results of computer science . At least in the fields where I work [compilers, formal verification], all of the above theory is common parlance. Everyone working on this stuff knows all o…
I empathise with people who go to college to study computer science, mainly with the intent of eventually landing a well-paid programming job, who are then frustrated when they have to learn actual computer science topics instead of just learning to program. But their anger is usually directed at the wrong institution. The problem doesn't lie with academia teaching the wrong things, it lies with companies requiring C…
We spent entirely too much time on O(this) and O(that)
But that's the stuff that sort of stood up to the test of time.
Also really helpful was symbolic logic, which actually was not a computer science course.
The most interesting computer science topics to me in school were the different computer languages -- but very few of them survived the test of time.
Re: Professor solves 240 computer science exam problems in 4 hours [video]
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
A lot of people give theory a lot of crap. But that's normally because they are not comfortable with the material. If you are comfortable with the material, you see applications for it all over the place, and use it all the time. Sure, you don't have to ground your system in some kind of formal model (you can just code-til-it-works), but when you do I've found it always ends up as a far simpler and more resilient pro…
I found it also helps with the hardest problem in software development: naming things. Without knowledge of the theory it can be hard to come up with a descriptive name for some data structure/algorithm you created to solve your problem. With some knowledge of the theory you can more easily put a name to what you have created, making it easier for other people to understand and giving them something to Google if they…
But loop variables are always i, j and k.