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Professor solves 240 computer science exam problems in 4 hours [video]

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Re: Professor solves 240 computer science exam problems in 4 hours [video]

#101

Post by _jal »

prostoalex wrote: post #94
ookdatnog wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

There's a bunch of commercial prep courses and coding bootcamps that focus on applied programming. I wonder how long-term those skills are, reminds me of companies teaching MCSE certification a few decades ago.

Think it depends entirely on the person. I know someone who went through one of those 6 years ago. He worked a grunt job for a while for experience, and has traded up to a very nice gig today. He also worked pretty hard on the side, teaching himself.

I can't speak for the longevity of the training, but he's doing fine.

For that matter, other than a terrible 101 class, I have no formal programming training and have been doing this professionally for over 20 years so far. But I'm a bit of a broken record when it comes to degrees-as-gatekeepers - the vast majority of programming jobs do not require a college diploma to competently perform. Very, very few people are writing blank-page Paxos implementations or researching "ai" - they're gluing APIs together and writing business logic. Moderate competence, the ability to do basic research and the patience to get past the WTF stage with a compiler are what you need, not a four year degree.

Re: Professor solves 240 computer science exam problems in 4 hours [video]

#102

Post by TrackerFF »

LockAndLol wrote: post #28

My CS exams in Europe and Australia involved calculations, proving stuff and applying knowledge to find the solution without a list of possible answers. Multiple choice questions at this level have always confused me and seemed like a really inept way of testing understanding (if they test understanding at all). I was fully expecting to see an implementation of a red-black tree, the use of software patterns, question…

Likely to do with the number of students taking the test. As N, number of students taking the test, grows - it just makes more sense to use a form which is easy to automatically grade.

I'm not how sure how many students are taking these test, but given that it's in India, we're probably talking about tens to hundreds of thousand students.

Re: Professor solves 240 computer science exam problems in 4 hours [video]

#103

Post by noir_lord »

m463 wrote: post #89
chmod775 wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

n for me for a long time but that’s BASIC showing through.

> It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration.” - Edsger Dijkstra

Re: Professor solves 240 computer science exam problems in 4 hours [video]

#104

Post by AnimalMuppet »

btilly wrote: post #71
valuearb wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You never use a Factory or Singleton? That’s weird to me cause I use them daily. But certainly Singletons can also be problematic, especially if you do automated testing, which I do not.

The use case for a Singleton is that you want to use a global variable but don't want to admit that you are using a global variable.

Here's an embedded system. It has a hardware resource. There's only one such hardware resource. A singleton to manage it is a natural.

I suppose you could argue that it's still a global variable, but I think it's more fundamental than that. You use a singleton when there should be exactly one of something. Why is there exactly one? "Because there's only one in the hardware" is a fundamentally different answer than "because it's a global variable".

Re: Professor solves 240 computer science exam problems in 4 hours [video]

#105

Post by tazedsoul »

Academia was not initially tasked with the purpose of preparing students for careers in industry. Academic interests are purely that: academic. They serve no intended purpose necessarily beyond their contribution to knowledge, understanding, and often the enjoyment of academics. In some cases, there is overlap between concepts of interest to academics and those in industry. However, to expect an undergraduate degree in an academic discipline, such as computer science, to prepare you for the needs of modern industry is to confuse the priorities and values of academia and industry. You can raise the question of, 'should this be the case?' and of course the answer will vary across fields, academics within fields, and students too. However, I would suggest that it may be an error to value the profit-driven needs of the industrial world to those of the academic world, which veer closer to having a value derived from the intrinsic nature of knowledge itself. If you want a school to teach you how to solve problems for Google or Facebook, I don't believe such a school should come at the cost of replacing the function and values of academia itself; perhaps some fields/departments in academia should extend study and degrees in the direction of industry-motivated study or new schools should open with such a focus. But don't be confused with your expectations that academic study should provide any tangible value in a capitalistic world.

Re: Professor solves 240 computer science exam problems in 4 hours [video]

#106

Post by m463 »

noir_lord wrote: post #103
m463 wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But loop variables are always i, j and k.

n for me for a long time but that’s BASIC showing through. > It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration.” - Edsger Dijkstra

He just couldn't imagine a proper language like Perl where you didn't even NEED a loop variable...

  foreach (@lines) {
      next if /^$/;
      ...

Re: Professor solves 240 computer science exam problems in 4 hours [video]

#107

Post by learc83 »

walty wrote: post #96
learc83 wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use CS theory all the time in my professional career. Automata, was the most useful class I took (the 2nd most useful was Programming Language Concepts).

What do you do professionally? How do you use automata there?

Web development, embedded systems, and game dev. I use FSMs, pushdown automata, and hierarchical state machines all the time.

Re: Professor solves 240 computer science exam problems in 4 hours [video]

#108

Post by chongli »

ookdatnog wrote: post #77
bollu wrote: post #43

I 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…

You can say that about many fields. Employers outsource their testing to universities. It saves them a ton of effort and it has the side benefit of shielding them from some potential discrimination claims.

Without university, how is an employer to know you would've spent 4 years working on something reasonably challenging that took a moderate to large amount of effort over long periods of time? They can't discover any of this in an interview. The fact that high school is mandatory robs it of much of its signalling value.

Re: Professor solves 240 computer science exam problems in 4 hours [video]

#109

Post by dlubarov »

criddell wrote: post #16
juskrey wrote: post #13

Skimming through the pages on the video, it shows vividly how far away academia is from real life problems.

The first few problems are about regular languages which are used when writing compilers and interpreters (among other things). It might not be something that very many people need in their daily work, but they are real life problems. I'm not sure, but I think GATE is a graduate school entrance exam.

Most programming languages support unlimited nesting (of parentheses, code blocks, etc.), so wouldn't they require at least a pushdown automaton?

Re: Professor solves 240 computer science exam problems in 4 hours [video]

#110

Post by Frost1x »

learc83 wrote: post #107
walty wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you do professionally? How do you use automata there?

Web development, embedded systems, and game dev. I use FSMs, pushdown automata, and hierarchical state machines all the time.

For embedded systems and game development I definitely understand automata applications (from experience) but web development has me curious. Are you writing transpilers or perhaps something else (I also try to avoid web dev, so there's that).
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