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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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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Yes, unless the material is interesting for its own sake. (Which it was, for me; but the opportunity cost is probably too high for most.)
End of conversation
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They need to teach _debugging_.
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They do, sometimes! Just not in the undergraduate algorithms class, because that class is for building a toolkit (and developing mathematical rigor). After we have a toolkit, then we can build a large project.
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