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0 pointshumbleMouse9y ago0 comments

I like your post and agree with most of what you said, except about the algorithms. I don't think you need 2 years to teach them. You need a highschool level understanding of Math and about a week. Obviously this varies from person to person - but I learned them extremely quickly.

I think where we are not seeing eye to eye here is that I envision a bootcamper that has a high aptitude for abstract thought, can read quickly, has a good understanding of math, and is motivated to keep learning and read books outside of "class".

If we are talking about two people who both do no outside reading other than what they are assigned - then yes, the college grad will be more prepared for abstract ideas/thought. However, if you take an otherwise smart person who reads lots of books and can learn things on the fly - then I think the sky is the limit.

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nostrebored9y ago

If you seriously think you can learn, with any amount of rigor and understanding, algorithms in a week you're absolutely delusional. I think that you would struggle to teach recursion including time complexity and practical applications in a week, and that's not even getting into simplex, dynamic programming, minimax, flow, etc...

eropple9y ago

> I don't think you need 2 years to teach them.

We aren't talking about "the algorithms", and to be honest the way you keep referring to "algorithms", rather than a phrase like "algorithmic thinking", is indicative of the real disconnect here. Spewing quicksort at a problem is easy and doesn't require one to really understand it in the first place, and if that's why I said "two years" I'd be totally an idiot. But it wasn't. Two years of instruction is for the mathematics and logic to understand algorithmic thinking at a level where you can reason about problems and approach them from a compositional, mathematical perspective--and that is invaluable when your problem is more than "order a list to splat into HTML". It's not high-school mathematics at all, except for the ten-thousand-foot-view.

I have yet to meet a--what's the phrase that everyone loves, "autodidact"?--who was as comfortable with higher-order computational thinking as many of the people I've worked with. Hell, I wish I had more of a mathematical and CS background than I do. Paxos and the like are still really hard to me!

spdionis9y ago

What algorithms did you learn in a week?

"I learned Algorithms in a week" sounds weird.

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largote9y ago

Rote memorizing algorithms is definitely not the same as understanding why and how they have their specific properties. When you can just use them as-is, it'll work, but without that understanding, tweaking for your specific use case will be hard.

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