Asked to recommend an intro algorithms text, I had no idea, but was curious and checked out the most popular ones. They’re all awful—not as books—but because the material covered shouldn’t be taught at that level. It’s mostly junk. Historical curiosities & intellectualization.
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Why don’t universities teach the skills software engineers need? Software reality is nebulous, so the skills needed to master it are necessarily meta-rational. Universities don’t know how to teach meta-rationality (at all, and especially not at the undergraduate level).
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Reminded of the architecture professor in Donald Schön’s case study: “I can’t teach you design, but I can put you in a situation where you may *become a designer*.” Becoming a superior software engineer means adopting critical attitudes, not learning little math tricks.
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One of the exercises in the CS course my daughter is taking is to identify sort algorithms by measuring their performance. The idea that the empirical trumps the theoretical in applications is an important thing to learn.
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"Nothing definite" seems a bit strong since you can still do static analysis? This won't tell you much about performance, though.
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Similarly, hardware/software troubleshooting (helpdesk services) is (more evidently) nebulous - and I wish people actually cared about being able to do it well! 'Wipe the hard drive and start again' might be (somewhat) practical but it is the opposite of helpful...
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