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Comment by anthonybsd | Hacker News Reader

> but there is certainly much in CS that you will simply never learn in the field.

Like what? In other words, what parts of undergrad CS could you not learn on your own from the books given reasonable amount of time, you figure?

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Well now you've changed the goalposts with "a reasonable amount of time" and self-study rather than industry experience. More to the "experience" point, I can't think of many jobs that will expose you to the sheer breadth of a good undergrad CS curriculum: think a solid foundation in algorithms, networking, calculus, linear algebra, databases, advanced algorithms (randomized, approximation), programming languages, compiler design, ai of various sorts, numerical methods, theory of computation, to name the big ones.

The top comment literally said "given books and free time." Not exactly moving goalposts.

See the part of the comment I quoted.

Okaaaaayyy, but then it's you that's moving the goalposts. The part you quoted must be taken in the context of the rest of the comment.

Someone's got to research the theories that you've read in the books. These are the kind of things you won't be able to learn in your spare time.

The issue comes down to whether it's reasonable to expect a very large number of people to try to emulate the work of the true professional theorists. For the average programmer, it might be nice to know once in a while, but why this continued emphasis on a (formal) theoretical background?

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