Quotes of the week

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.