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Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

Even MIT abandoned Scheme and SICP and switched to Python. There's a beautiful elegance to that approach. It gives a sense of the mathematical foundation of computer science. It's not that useful for building large programs from off the shelf libraries, which is what almost everybody does today.

At one time, computer science required a good understand of what's in Vol. 1 of Knuth. That's not in much demand any more. Just about everything in there you now get from a well-debugged library.

There are people who still write hash tables, and they're serious hash table theorists. I'm impressed with how good hash table technology is today. You can get over 90%+ fill and near-constant time. But only a few people today need to know about that.

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There's really no reason to go to university if all you want is to write some Python scripts. University is not vocational training.

> University is not vocational training.

I'll believe that when employers stop giving preference to people with university credentials.

Until they do that, the primary reason most people go to university for CS will continue to be 'for vocational training.' People follow incentives.

Employers don't prefer university graduates because universities offer better vocational training. Universities teach scientific thinking which makes students better employees. Universities don't teach specific skills but they teach the underling principles.

Employers prefer university graduates because they have to pay extra for good people. And if they have to pay extra they want a kind of certificate that it's worth it plus to justify the extra pay in front of other employees. A degree makes all this easier. Yes scientific thinking is nice but what really matters is that this people can deliver a compkex workload at a given date. In the rarest of cases you actually need a researcher and at that point you want someone with a PhD

If the employers don't want people who have a detailed understanding of academic minutia, they should maybe stop hiring from university courses and set up some sort of vocational system.

Just because there is a need for vocational experts doesn't mean the universities should try to fill it. The place in society for universities is not a short-term-practical one.

Yah, they’ve always demanded to see my Engineering degree to even consider my application, only to proceed patronizing me from day one about how the grown-ups do work differently.

Now that I’ve put enough years I don’t get the treatment any more, just strenuously opposed with script-kiddie hacks when I put some intellectual effort in what I’m doing.

There’s a ton of people out there saddling down the industry who are totally our of their depth and terrified of becoming irrelevant.

This is a very minority view, unfortunately. The politics of UK higher education has been completely marketized, and university courses are ranked by what salary the graduates can achieve.

Arts funding is being drastically cut: https://www.theartnewspaper.com/news/plans-to-cut-higher-edu... partly because arts graduates make less and partly because studying liberal arts makes students liberal, which the government perceives as a threat.

If the employers don't want people who have a detailed understanding of academic minutiæ, why do they spend so much time testing their prospective hires for detailed understanding of academic minutiæ?

As an employer, why should I spend money, time, and attention on setting up a vocational system when I can just keep doing what I'm doing, and have other people spend money, time, and attention in the process of educating my employees?

> University is not vocational training.

University started out as a trade school for the clergy, then added law and medicine, and then became a finishing school. At all points the median student was more interested in drinking than studying. Scholarship has always been a minority pursuit at universities and research universities haven’t even existed for 300 years. Universities are now and always have been vocational institutions. The supply of idle rich who don’t need a job has never been all that high.

... I'm not sure anything you said is true. Unless I'm misunderstanding you.

See Cambridge as a counter example of everything you said: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Cambridge

I've found that for topics like this, the vast majority of Hacker News thinks the world began in 1776. Saying this, the Universities of Oxford and Paris do meet GPs argument - there were heavily theologian until fairly recently. Cambridge was too until the 16th century.

Also Bologna, the oldest and first university in Christendom. Notice that all of the subjects studied are either vocational, i.e. they lead to jobs, or the liberal arts, which are a prerequisite for studying theology.

> The university arose around mutual aid societies (known as universitates scholarium) of foreign students called "nations" (as they were grouped by nationality) for protection against city laws which imposed collective punishment on foreigners for the crimes and debts of their countrymen. These students then hired scholars from the city's pre-existing lay and ecclesiastical schools to teach them subjects such as liberal arts, notarial law, theology, and ars dictaminis (scrivenery).[17]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Bologna

In more mundane terms, the fact that you go to university to get a good job has been the social contract pretty much everywhere in the world in the 20th/21st centuries.

The idea that this is “not what it was meant for” which is oft repeated on HN - and I presume in academic circles too - is not only inaccurate as you point out, but also arguably irrelevant, because the people paying the bills and justifying its existence expect otherwise.

> the fact that you go to university to get a good job has been the social contract pretty much everywhere in the world in the 20th/21st centuries.

It's an idea from the middle of the 20th century. For much of the 20th century, university was just something you did if you were upper class. Then someone noticed that upper-class people had good jobs and decided that must be due to their university attendance. It wasn't.

The clergy weren't a vocational body, they were a club. And wars were fought over whether the people in that club had to go to university to be able to join.

Ditto the lawyers, who certainly don't need to go to university to read law or argue. Being a lawyer is also basically being in a special club.

Medicine, I can only see a vocational aspect. But that is only 1 in 3.

> At all points the median student was more interested in drinking than studying.

A good use to time in the club. But only relatively rich students can afford to do this. Anyone who drinks their way through a university experience is either rich or busy trying to join a club.

Where can one find those hash table theorists? (Just curious, that sounds really interesting actually)

I wrote some hash tables at an automated trading firm. They were really only suitable for our exact access pattern though.

Usually you find people like this making libraries or programming language runtimes I guess.

I don't know if you'd call him a theorist, but I think this gentleman maintains GHashTable and I found his posts comparing/benchmarking widely used hash tables really informative and entertaining:

https://hpjansson.org/blag/2018/07/24/a-hash-table-re-hash/

https://probablydance.com/2017/02/26/i-wrote-the-fastest-has...

Thanks, this is a great read.

Daniel Lemire has some very interesting blog articles about "low level" data structures that you'd think you understood in first year CS.

I just linked to a google search on "hash tables" because that's what you asked for, but some of his other posts are really quite fascinating.

https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Alemire.me+hash+table

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