I actually had to fix a bug just last week in our production code that was caused by an arithmetic overflow, and I was only able to diagnose it because I knew 2s compliment.
This stuff seems arcane and pointless. It's not. Over and over again in my career, I'm the only guy on the team who can solve some nasty little problem, and it's because my undergrad CS program taught us all the old-school theoretical goodness.
Of course, they also completely left out useful things like OO, testing, or really anything related to software engineering. But these are all things you can learn on the job. You can't (or at least, won't) ever learn the mathematical underpinnings of this stuff at work. So you really have to do it in school.
Those two statements are contrapositives -- logically equivalent.
He claimed that if something hasn't been measured, then there's no reason to believe it exists.
I've been working in and around Silicon Valley for the past 6 years. At least at the companies I've worked for/at/with, I'd say probably less than 10% of software developers have CS degrees. Maybe a lot less. And there is definitely a strong correlation between having a CS degree and having a clue how to write software. That being said, a couple of the best programmers I've ever met didn't have CS degrees. For most people, though, I think spending four years studying compilers, data structures, etc. is invaluable in their future careers as, gasp, programmers. Myself included.
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I actually had to fix a bug just last week in our production code that was caused by an arithmetic overflow, and I was only able to diagnose it because I knew 2s compliment. This stuff seems arcane and pointless. It's not. Over and over again in my career, I'm the only guy on the team who can solve some nasty little problem, and it's because my undergrad CS program taught us all the old-school theoretical goodness. Of course, they also completely left out useful things like OO, testing, or really anything related to software engineering. But these are all things you can learn on the job. You can't (or at least, won't) ever learn the mathematical underpinnings of this stuff at work. So you really have to do it in school.
touche
Those two statements are contrapositives -- logically equivalent. He claimed that if something hasn't been measured, then there's no reason to believe it exists.
I've been working in and around Silicon Valley for the past 6 years. At least at the companies I've worked for/at/with, I'd say probably less than 10% of software developers have CS degrees. Maybe a lot less. And there is definitely a strong correlation between having a CS degree and having a clue how to write software. That being said, a couple of the best programmers I've ever met didn't have CS degrees. For most people, though, I think spending four years studying compilers, data structures, etc. is invaluable in their future careers as, gasp, programmers. Myself included.