John Bokma <j...@castleamber.com> writes: > David Kastrup <d...@gnu.org> writes: > >> John Passaniti <john.passan...@gmail.com> writes: >> >>> Amen! All this academic talk is useless. Who cares about things like >>> the big-O notation for program complexity. Can't people just *look* >>> at code and see how complex it is?! And take things like the years of >>> wasted effort computer scientists have put into taking data structures >>> (like hashes and various kinds of trees) and extending them along >>> various problem domains and requirements. Real programmers don't >>> waste their time with learning that junk. What good did any of that >>> ever do anyone?! >> >> It is my experience that in particular graduated (and in particular Phd) >> computer scientists don't waste their time _applying_ that junk. > > Question: do you have a degree in computer science? > > Since in my experience: people who talk about their experience with > graduated people often missed the boat themselves and think that reading > a book or two equals years of study.
I have a degree in electrical engineering. But that's similarly irrelevant. I have a rather thorough background with computers (started with punched cards), get along with about a dozen assembly languages and quite a few other higher level languages. I've had to write the BIOS for my first computer and a number of other stuff and did digital picture enhancement on DOS computers with EMM (programming 80387 assembly language and using a variant of Hartley transforms). I have rewritten digital map processing code from scratch that has been designed and optimized by graduated computer scientists (including one PhD) to a degree where it ran twice as fast as originally, at the cost of occasional crashes and utter unmaintainability. Twice as fast meaning somewhat less than a day of calculation time for medium size data sets (a few 100000 of data points, on something like a 25MHz 68020 or something). So I knew the problem was not likely to be easy. Took me more than a week. After getting the thing to compile and fixing the first few crashing conditions, I got stuck in debugging. The thing just terminated after about 2 minutes of runtime without an apparent reason. I spent almost two more days trying to find the problem before bothering to even check the output. The program just finished regularly. That has not particularly helped my respect towards CS majors and PhDs in the function of programmers (and to be honest: their education is not intended to make them good programmers, but to enable them to _lead_ good programmers). That does not mean that I am incapable of analyzing, say quicksort and mergesort, and come up with something reasonably close to a closed form for average, min, and max comparisons (well, unless a close approximation is good enough, you have to sum about lg n terms which is near instantaneous, with a real closed form mostly available when n is special, like a power of 2). And I know how to work with more modern computer plagues, like the need for cache coherency. So in short, I have a somewhat related scientific education, but I can work the required math. And I can work the computers. > Oh, and rest assured, it works both ways: people who did graduate are > now and then thinking it's the holy grail and no body can beat it with > home study. > > Both are wrong, by the way. Depends. In my personal opinion, living close to the iron and being sharp enough can make a lot of a difference. Donald Knuth never studied computer science. He more or less founded it. As a programmer, he is too much artist and too little engineer for my taste: you can't take his proverbial masterpiece "TeX" apart without the pieces crumbling. He won't write inefficient programs: he has the respective gene and the knowledge to apply it. But the stuff he wrote is not well maintainable and reusable. Of course, he has no need for reuse if he can rewrite as fast as applying an interface. -- David Kastrup -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
