Quotes of the week
Quotes of the week
Posted Jun 24, 2022 19:28 UTC (Fri) by pizza (subscriber, #46)In reply to: Quotes of the week by khim
Parent article: Quotes of the week
Then WTF did that person sign up for a course to learn about the fundamentals of CPU operation and assembly language if all they care about is writing android apps?
> When you teach them MS-DOS programming on 8086 CPU or some RISC programming on imaginary CPU they don't perceive it as something even remotely relevant to what they feel is important.
You know, one of the points of being a student is that, whatever your feelings, you don't know enough about anything to know what is actually important.
Meanwhile, When you'e doing a CompE degree, knowing how CPU instruction sets are put together and implemented is _very_ relevant. When you're doing a CS degree with a systems specialization, knowing how high level languages get mapped to asm, and the implications for data structures and locality is also _very_ relevant. Everyone else? By all means, pick a different elective.
> For 99% of students (and, worse, probably for their teachers, too) what they are teaching are some fairy tales which are 100% irrelevant to what they do on web courses or machine learning courses.
The same can be said about pretty much any field of study. Do 99% of students in science-focused areas of study care about calculus?
Posted Jun 25, 2022 10:33 UTC (Sat)
by mpr22 (subscriber, #60784)
[Link] (4 responses)
Calculus is highly relevant to almost everyone who wants to actually get into physics, and someone who just wants an abbreviation beginning with 'B' after their name because they think it's good for their employment prospects can probably find a more congenial topic of study than physics.
Posted Jun 25, 2022 15:51 UTC (Sat)
by khim (subscriber, #9252)
[Link] (3 responses)
Nope. Not all calculus is relevant. You need to know how to apply certain things from calculus to get physically plausible answers. And people are not learning obscure parts of calculus like calculus of functors. Except the ones who would pick them voluntarily. Yet people in CS department are taught things which are almost entirely irrelevant to practical programming… can you blame them when they are not all that enthusiastic?
Posted Jun 25, 2022 21:08 UTC (Sat)
by pizza (subscriber, #46)
[Link] (2 responses)
My CS department required me to take more mathematics than even the engineering students, as well as formal logic, proofs, automata, and other "theory-of-computing" types of stuff. The goal of that program was to produce _scientists_ who could advance the field, not crank out code monkeys. There are much easier, faster, and cheaper ways to achieve the latter.
Posted Jun 28, 2022 14:10 UTC (Tue)
by khim (subscriber, #9252)
[Link] (1 responses)
Maybe 100 years ago or 50 years ago when the majority of people with high diploma degree were scientists this approach worked. Today the majority of people who are getting high education are doing that with the desire to join companies like Google or Microsoft… and become code monkeys in reality. That's how this whole circus may survive. Do you really think that 50% of population should become scientists who will advance the field? IMNSHO that's entirely unrealistic.
Posted Jun 30, 2022 11:23 UTC (Thu)
by mrugiero (guest, #153040)
[Link]
None of that makes it right to shove all that into CS. CS is about computer science. It should be forming scientists, that is its goal, the name itself tells you that. You don't need the programmers' education to be the same as scientists, but changing course within CS careers is pretty much doing it wrong for both. Now you have programmers making an unnecessarily hard career and scientists having to compromise on either a larger career or diluting subjects that are important for their profession. If programmer oriented careers suck or whatever is it that makes people lean on CS courses when they just want to program, then fix those careers.
Posted Jun 25, 2022 15:45 UTC (Sat)
by khim (subscriber, #9252)
[Link] (5 responses)
Who said he did? Someone was complaining to CS department that students know nothing about low-level programming. The guys in charge heard and understood. And made that course mandatory. Now students learn the course which they know is just a waste of time. Would that give them knowledge of anything? That was, maybe, true, years ago. When 5% or 10% got BA/BSc. Today situation is different: about 50% get the degree thus, of course, people come there knowing full well what they need to know (hint: look on any hiring site and see what skills are listed there). Everything else is irrelevant waste of time to the majority of them. This even affects guys who want to learn something: it's kinda hard to be excited about something if you know you would be mocked and ostracized if you would do that. Not an option. It's not an elective. Most likely not. But they are taught it, anyway. And teachers know they don't care about calculus per see (but can be interested by practical applications of it) and thus they pick “practically important” parts of calculus to ensure these students would be interested enough to learn something.
Posted Jun 25, 2022 20:59 UTC (Sat)
by pizza (subscriber, #46)
[Link] (1 responses)
Ah, so what you're really saying is that an "education" is an irrelevant waste of time for the majority of people.
Posted Jun 26, 2022 7:09 UTC (Sun)
by Wol (subscriber, #4433)
[Link]
Probably yes.
Somewhere in education theory I came across the ?fact? that we acquire the ability for abstract thought at about age 14. Accompanied by another sobering fact - maybe half the population NEVER acquire that ability.
Given that that ability is pretty much a necessity for a higher level education, it seems clear that a large chunk of our effort directed at University Education is pretty much wasted ...
Cheers,
Posted Jun 30, 2022 11:25 UTC (Thu)
by mrugiero (guest, #153040)
[Link] (2 responses)
Posted Jun 30, 2022 11:37 UTC (Thu)
by khim (subscriber, #9252)
[Link] (1 responses)
How? The majority of people who finish that department (and continue to work on something related to what they learned) end up working as programmers. This, naturally, makes it reasonable to go there to work as a programmer and get a better salary. How? Yes, at one point this department was about science. Today it mostly provides programmers to the industry. And people join it to become programmers in the industry. It's similar to Linux: it wasn't create to power mobile devices. But today the singnificant percent of Linux devices are phones. Thus you can not ignore issues of power usage. Similarly when college mostly produces programmers it should be optimised for that.
Posted Jun 30, 2022 13:24 UTC (Thu)
by mrugiero (guest, #153040)
[Link]
And many physicists end up working in data science using a subset of the skills they got in college. That doesn't make it an efficient path to get there, and any physicist would point out that making it a data science career by removing all those useless quantum mechanics classes would be utter nonsense.
> How? Yes, at one point this department was about science. Today it mostly provides programmers to the industry. And people join it to become programmers in the industry.
By accident.
> It's similar to Linux: it wasn't create to power mobile devices. But today the singnificant percent of Linux devices are phones. Thus you can not ignore issues of power usage.
This is a very bad analogy IMO. Kernels behave similarly in mobile and non-mobile devices, specially since the main difference between two very similar usecases (desktop and laptop) is just the battery. Enter phones and the kernel cares for much the same things as laptops, specially with today's smartphones that are quite beefy compared to computers of old. The userspace and GUI, on the other hand, needs to be wildly different, and it is. So, if we're going with that analogy, Linux is algo 101. The intro may very well suit anybody. But at some point you need to specialize to properly serve the user (student). You don't run KDE on a phone, and all attempts to do that failed. You don't run Android on your workstation.
> Similarly when college mostly produces programmers it should be optimised for that.
Absolutely not. Nothing stops you from creating a career that is optimized for producing programmers. What we have right now is suboptimal for producing both programmers and scientists. The concerns are not the same.
Posted Jun 30, 2022 11:19 UTC (Thu)
by mrugiero (guest, #153040)
[Link]
Quotes of the week
Quotes of the week
Quotes of the week
Quotes of the week
Quotes of the week
>
> Today the majority of people who are getting high education are doing that with the desire to join companies like Google or Microsoft… and become code monkeys in reality.
>
> That's how this whole circus may survive.
>
> Do you really think that 50% of population should become scientists who will advance the field? IMNSHO that's entirely unrealistic.
> Then WTF did that person sign up for a course to learn about the fundamentals of CPU operation and assembly language if all they care about is writing android apps?
Quotes of the week
Quotes of the week
Quotes of the week
Wol
Quotes of the week
> They knew so little they enrolled in a career that wasn't about being hired to be a programmer.
Quotes of the week
Quotes of the week
Quotes of the week