introduction to CS

John Larkin wrote

That is _exactly_ where the problem is, courses of nothing. Do not bother, and you will be fine. Let them waste the trillions for stuff that does not work.

Maybe if you show her how to program something humanity will be saved,.,,

It is all fake.

Must be a really good university, didn't know they managed to survive, except for the ivy league facilities. By education I'm of the same breed, theoretical CS. I can confirm every single word of your friend, for a layman it would be hard to tell the difference between that and a regular math.

Roughly, there are two main streams, algorithmics and formal languages. Complexity theory is at their intersection. Try wiki to check if you want to go there:

Best regards, Piotr

On Saturday, January 26, 2019 at 3:35:33 PM UTC-5, snipped-for-privacy@nospam.org w rote:

I remember helping a friend who was working on a Masters degree in teaching which is pretty much required to teach school these days, if not at the st art, within a few years. She was having trouble reading a research paper ( topic long ago forgotten) and asked me to help. I recall it was written by a PhD and as I read it, I had the hardest time figuring out what it was ab out. Eventually I waded through the verbage to find it was about something fairly obvious and this paper added pretty much nothing to the issue.

Yeah, there are different ways of looking at the world. But that is not un ique to education. I've met people who ran departments in engineering beca use they knew how to blow the magic smoke, and not the kind that gets let o ut of chips.

So no need to pick on education. It's an issue of people, not the field.

Rick C.

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Bubble sorts and abstract data structures. Get a book on data structures.

Cheers

You already know how programming works.

Get the course outline. Buy the book(s) they use in the course. Google the terms that are not explained well. Look for other online courses from MIT, etc. and skim though them. some sed netizens can also help.

I know nothing, why not ask her for a freshman text... maybe you can get one gratis. (Math and algorithms would be my guess... talk about FFT's?) George H.

For this kind of thing it's nice to have podcasts to listen and learn with as you do something else, so no productive time lost.

Go to episode #233 almost at the bottom of the page. It's the first instalment on the subject right from bare bones and leads on from there.

Or this more complete description for a BSCS from UT

Forgot the link

Interestingly this course seems to involve quite a lot of programming (with too much emphasis on Java imo).

MK

Donald Knuth, one of the "greats" of computer science out of Stanford, stated that computer science is "the study of algorithms."

Algorithms were being academically studied before the invention of digital computers and you don't necessarily need a computer or programming language to study them - math, pen, and paper can work fine.

"Computer Science" has become a rather generic term over time just to mean a curriculum that focuses pragmatically-speaking on computers and programming and software design, but if you look at the computer science stack exchange for researchers and grad students you will find little in the way of practical programming questions which it isn't the place for, it's more like a mathematics Q&A site:

Well, no. CS has a lot to do with the theoretical aspects of computability, combinatorics and algorithms. I think the comment "We don't teach programming!" has a lot to do with differentiating them from places that ONLY teach programming without the fundamental theory backing it up. And, I see a lot of code where the authors DIDN'T have that theory, and they made a BIG mess! Doing simple things the hard way, or doing hard things so wrong that they cause a catastrophe when odd input is entered.

I DID get most of a classical CS education 40+ years ago, and it has been QUITE helpful in avoiding major messes when doing mildly complicated stuff, because I **DO** know what is going on all the way down to the basic gate level, when it matters.

Jon Jon

Sure, and long time ago I enlisted in a a university course 'information technology' there was a separate group doing 'operating systems'. As I had actually written one, I thought that is interesting, but found an error in their intro paper. So I enlisted and wrote to the prof that there was an error. I got promptly rejected for that subgroup,.. no reasons given.. Then I went to one of the lectures where some women was welcoming me and others, and overheard here making an error in the conversation with a poor newcomer... so I pointed that out (in a very kind way). She got all pissed of and said 'I cannot stand it when somebody corrects me'. Now that was enough for me, I'd seen it all, actually in those days they also did some programming, in Pascal that is, I think I dumped the books in the garbage and never missed those. And that, is the reality of it.

Right, sometimes at uni it's best to keep your head down till you find out who the a-holes and angles are. (Says a man who spent a lifetime there... )

George H.

It is pretty much the difference between making concrete and civil engineering to design skyscrapers and bridges that do not fall down.

His books are still required reading on some courses although the polyunsaturated Mix assembler now looks rather dated.

Turing's contributions to computing and computer science are timeless for example. In the early days computing and computer science was seen in some universities as an impure branch of applied mathematics. Only a handful were smart enough to build their own computers in the UK Cambridge EDSAC (Wilkes) and Manchester ACE and Baby(Turing).

At the high end universities it still is. The people who design software and hardware intended to scale across any size of network and work reliably tend to do those courses. Admission to the best courses is competitive and the courses rigorous and tough.

I have never known a computer science course (or a hard sciences course for that matter) that didn't include some programming.

I've looked over the syllabi for some "advanced data structures" courses it's one of those humbling experiences where you realize there are whole worlds of advanced shit out there that chances are you're never gonna understand.

I could implement a binary tree from scratch on a good day. These are data structures for high-frequency trading or massively-scalable internet/Web-infrastructure stuff serving up millions of page views a second