I vaguely remember that in the 1990's the US Advanced Placement test for CS was done in Pascal. The point has to be a focus on fundamentals. There are fundamental data structures and algorithms that any programmer is useless if they don't know, and I doubt people are learning these at bootcamps in 6 months.
> Colleges teach fundamentals like lambda calculus, but fail to teach practical skills.
College CS programs in the USA are focusing more and more on appeasing recruiters and HR folk with keywords than in teaching CS fundamentals. And I think that's a tragedy.
> College CS programs in the USA are focusing more and more on appeasing recruiters and HR folk with keywords than in teaching CS fundamentals. And I think that's a tragedy.
If true, I am sure we would agree on that score.
> There are fundamental data structures and algorithms that any programmer is useless if they don't know, and I doubt people are learning these at bootcamps in 6 months.
I believe that what gets taught at bootcamps is how to tackle new things, and professional standards of code quality. More learning how to learn. I do dispute the idea of "any programmer is useless if they don't know X" for any X. It's too strongly worded, for one thing. If you qualify 'programmer' as someone with 4-6 languages under their belt then yes, if that person doesn't know their algorithms they're probably going to be less productive -- writing BASIC in every language. That is unfortunately far from useless. But the subset of coding tasks you'd assign to junior developers are probably not going to inconvenience you much if you don't know how to do an A* search.
I vaguely remember that in the 1990's the US Advanced Placement test for CS was done in Pascal. The point has to be a focus on fundamentals. There are fundamental data structures and algorithms that any programmer is useless if they don't know, and I doubt people are learning these at bootcamps in 6 months.
> Colleges teach fundamentals like lambda calculus, but fail to teach practical skills.
College CS programs in the USA are focusing more and more on appeasing recruiters and HR folk with keywords than in teaching CS fundamentals. And I think that's a tragedy.