I also think this is where things like intergenerational math-phobia come from: parents who don't grasp core concepts and are scared off, and can't help their own children, creating an ongoing cycle.
I hope you appreciate my addition of the other common path of math phobia.
It’s probably why, when I got to university and tackled subjects like probability theory, discrete math, and theoretical CS, I did extremely well — they weren’t reliant on the shaky algebra and trig foundation I had from school. Once the focus shifted to logic and conceptual thinking, without the baggage of poorly taught fundamentals, everything clicked
The "mistake" happens so often, partially because "segway" is a much more straightforward spelling if one has only heard the word said aloud, that I think it will eventually become the actual way it is spelled!
Looking it up in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Segue they even warn about that!
That's precisely how language changes over time. Language is not a strict set of rules. It's based on understanding and consensus, so sometimes things that are "wrong" do end up being accepted.
I suggest this as a great introduction into what languages are and how they evolve over time https://www.amazon.com/Language-Families-of-World-audiobook/...
In more forgiving of mixing up homophones, even if one of them is a registered trademark (Segway).
I suggest you yourself take a second and explore why you think being smarmy on the internet is a way of getting people to agree with you.
You must understand these things at least conceptually if you want to really understand how to write efficient programs. Maybe not at the level of how memory can electronically "remember" a 1 or a zero, or how a hard drive can magnetically do it, but at least the relative speeds e.g. register vs. cache vs. RAM vs. disk.
I've received great intellectual satisfaction from various well-taught subjects. I would rather chop off a finger than lose them. So curriculum committees that make subjects boring are doing something worse than chopping off millions of children's fingers.
I really wish that teaching of history will get better for current and future kids.
- Paul Valéry
My favourite classes were those where we didn't just get taught facts and theorems but we also got taught a bit about who proved the theorem for the first time, who discovered this fact, what this algorithm was first used for, etc. So much easier to remember too.
This is one of the best things about studying law: the very nature of it makes it impossible to teach it without the historical context.
imagine that!? an historically informed populace???
you'd need more expensive lies and higher quality fakes... the government would be costlier to run.
ideally, in the long term this would make the national currency's value in the international money market rise up. but why wait for that when one can directly manipulate money through trade fraud and covert military ploys?
Speaking for myself, and I’m sure many others on hn, I was very interested in the history of computers at 13!
I must confess, it gives my dry old heart some joy, to see the anti-education masses coming from this, voting and storming the fortresses that produced the paywall around education, that only money with tutors could or accidental intrinsic motivation could overcome and burn & salt those outposts of classists academia.
Developed countries really need a come to Jesus moment, because the disdain for everything that made them great places is unbelievable. People will understand, after great suffering, that destroying stuff is much easier than building it.
"It is easier to destroy than to create" doesn't tell you when something should be torn down.
You can have a house that provided shelter for your family for generations, but if it's water damaged, the floors are rotting and it's full of toxic mold, the person who shows up with a bulldozer isn't necessarily wrong.
But systems can rot from within too, or just decay naturally, and don't need to be destroyed. What if the core ideas that built our current civilization were ideas of the past, that we don't have any more, and we don't know what to do when The Machine Stops? Doesn't have to be a literal machine - it's a good metaphor for how democracy fell apart.
If the child is fascinated by video games- i would help it make video games, the curriculum be damned. All knowledge holes can be filled later, but the passion to wanting to know, can never be restored unless the want for knowledge remains intact.
Their interests are built by what they are taught. "Socioeconomic background" is a tautology. Their backgrounds are irrelevant.
The answer is it's magic and no one cares, now let's go build some games
At school I thought "computer science" meant "programming" - which it doesn't. So well done for recognizing this before wasting your much time. (Seriously, not sarcastic.) programming can easily be learned outside college.
To other general readers here though I'll say that understanding the science can be really helpful over a career. It's not terribly applicable in getting that first job, but as you progress more and more of those theoretical fundamentals come into play.
Ultimately there are a small fraction of people who need to understand how it all works, all the way down, because those people build the things that programmers use to build everything else.
It very much felt like a Wikipedia article on the history of computers somehow stretched out over an entire summer.
I have my own issues with the way college is generally setup. Do students really need a massive amusement park when self study along with 3 or 4 exams would provided the same value. Will spending 70k per year in total cost of attendence at said amusement park serve them?
I don't really like boot camps either, personally I'd like companies to be more open to actually training people again. I doubt it'll happen though.
Well, yeah. That's true for any field of study. Every college has strengths and weaknesses- its the opposite of a franchise.
>> I took a few foundational classes at community college.
A few foundational classes is somewhat different to classes you take in prep for a major. I did a foundational class in astronomy, designed for students who were just looking for an introduction. It was very different to my comp Sci classes in tone and style.
Yes there was some math involved, but not much in the comp science classes. Math was a pre-requisite though so we got our math in, well, math.
I just don’t like the idea of gate keeping it behind an expensive degree. The source code for most popular frameworks and tools is free for anyone to read.
It’s not like medicine or something where you need to drop 300k on education.
Of course, in this field, learning is continuous. You're not going to use just one language (much less one framework) over a decades-long career. It's also likely that your domain will change, your focus area and so on.
A good college course doesn't prepare you for programming in one language, but all of them. (In the sense that once you understand the theory of programming, language is just syntax.)
You get exposure to different types of languages (imperative, functional etc).
I think for me the critical takeaways though were research, critical thinking and communication. The "skills" are easy to learn yourself, but the formality in which you place that learning is harder to do yourself.
Which is not to say a degree is a requirement- it's clearly not. But it's helpful because it builds a strong foundation on which the self-learning can rest.
There are theoretical parts of computer science, but it is fundamentally a practical subject. All of it is in service to programming. Type systems are about typing programs. Algorithms are implemented using programs. Data structures are for use in programs.
The very worst computer science lecturers are those that forget it is a practical subject and try to teach it like abstract mathematics, because they believe (whether they realise they believe it or not) that it is more prestigious to teach abstract concepts than practical concrete things.
It is the same in mathematics, where unfortunately there has developed a tradition since Bourbaki of trying to teach abstract notions as fundamental while concrete problem solving is left to the engineers. The result is that many engineers are much stronger mathematicians than many mathematically-trained students, and those students have to relearn the practical foundations of the subject before they can make progress at the graduate level. If they don't, they get stuck doing what looks like maths, but is actually just abstract roleplaying.
This was a point repeatedly driven home in my undergraduate curriculum, and in fact, they made a point of having multiple classes where a computer was completely uninvolved.
It's probably fair to say that although we learned some history, we had the privilege of learning at a time the field was exploding. That history you learned, I lived and worked through that. It's somewhat surreal to realize that my career is your history class.
As mentioned above though, it'll vary a lot from one school to another.
As a matter of fact, I gave up after just one year. It wasn't any fun for anyone, not for the students, not for me.