Hacker News Reader

Comment by bsaul | Hacker News Reader

Imho , schools like those don't do enough "hard" science, like math, to prepare you for the future.

Have you done enough linear algebra to work on image processing, or with neural networks , and understand the various parameters to tweak the libraries ?

Done enough logic (the math branch) to understand the deep nature , or at least feel the taste of the type systems to come ( scala, haskell and now more and more swift kotlin and rust), or use formal program proofs toolings ?

Enough statistics, physics and algebra to get a hint of what's under the hood of Quantum computers, should they come one day ?

View on HN

There are CS Engineering schools in France that have a large part of their teaching in "hard" science.

For example, in my school (ENSIIE). I've studied Operational Research, Graph Theory, Logic, Probability, Statistic, Formal Program Proof, and other subjects I don't remember (oups...).

No Quantum Computing in my school however.

But it might be present in better schools like ENSIMAG or Supelec.

The side effect is that these schools tend to be old school in their purely technical teachings. No learning of <fancy JS framework released a weak ago> or how to configure <enterprise stuff> or <fancy cloud provider>, only basic programming skills in C, Java or CPP, SQL, a little assembly, OCaml and some Unix administration skills. By themselves, these schools will not produce code monkeys.

I had some course about linear algebra, though I agree only the very basics (matrix multiplication etc. but nothing fancy about convolution etc. so I would need to follow a course to be able to implement a raytracer for example)

About neural network, also we didn't learned it, but we learned prolog and lips. And prolog itself was a "mind blowing" moment that I would not have exchanged against quantum physics or more maths.

I'm learning rust right now, so I think it's more about the mindset, the school being here mostly to open up your mind about subjects.

Generally I think you're right, but tbh you don't need to be a MIT class A mathematician physician master to become a great systems engineer. Scala, Rust, Kotlin etc has (to me) the same learning curve as Java and I think most system devs will be able to adopt the languages if they wish to do so.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com