This is one of the things I'd tune in the current curriculum.
When I went to college in the late 1990s, we were right on the verge of a major transition to DSAs being something every programmer would implement themselves to something that you just pick up out of your libraries. So it makes sense that we would have some pretty heavy-duty labs on implementing very basic data structures.
That said, I escaped into the dynamic programming world for the next 15 years or so, so I almost never actually did anything of significance with this. And now even in the static world, I almost never do anything with this stuff directly because it's all libraries for them now too. Even a lot of modern data structures work is just using associative maps and arrays together properly.
So I would agree that we could A: spend somewhat less time on this in the curriculum and B: tune it to more about how to use arrays and maps and less about how to bit bang efficient hash tables.
People always get frosty about trying to remove or even "tune down" the amount of time spent in a curriculum, but consider the number of things you want to add and consider that curricula are essentially zero-sum games; you can't add to them without removing something. If we phrase this in terms of "what else could we be teaching other than a fifth week on pointer-based data structures" I imagine it'll sound less horrifying to tweak this.
Not that it'll be tweaked, of course. But it'd be nice to imagine that I could live in a world where we could have reasonable discussions about what should be in them.
About 20 years ago I failed out of the undergrad CS program at UIUC because I thought I was smart enough to skip most lectures. I did manage to get an A in the C++ Data Structures course because the lectures were recorded and I just binged them all the night before each test.
Anyways, now I’m a full-time lecturer teaching undergraduate CS courses (long story) and I’m actually shaping curriculum. As soon as I read this article I thought “I need to tell my data structures students to read this” because it echoes a lot of what I’ve been saying in class.
Case in point: right after two lectures covering the ArrayList versus LinkedList implementations of the Java List interface, I spent an entire lecture on JUnit and live-coded a performance test suite that produced actual data to back up our discussions of big-O complexity. The best part of all? They learned about JIT compilation in the JVM firsthand because it completely blew apart the expected test results.
> Anyways, now I’m a full-time lecturer teaching undergraduate CS courses (long story)
I would love to hear that story if you're willing to tell it.
It sounds like you're a great lecturer, though, giving the students exactly the sort of stuff they need. I remember a university lecturer explaining to us that "JIT" just meant that Java loaded the class files when it needed them, rather than loading them all at the start, so your lesson sounds like a far cry from those days!
I don’t think the primary value in learning data structures and algorithms is the ability to implement them yourself. It’s more of a way to get repetitions in on basic programming skills while learning about the tools that are available to you. Later in a CS curriculum you might learn how to write an operating system or a compiler, not because you’re necessarily going to ever actually do it again but because it’s a way of learning how those systems work as well as getting repetitions building larger projects.
When I went to college in the late 1990s, we were right on the verge of a major transition to DSAs being something every programmer would implement themselves to something that you just pick up out of your libraries. So it makes sense that we would have some pretty heavy-duty labs on implementing very basic data structures.
That said, I escaped into the dynamic programming world for the next 15 years or so, so I almost never actually did anything of significance with this. And now even in the static world, I almost never do anything with this stuff directly because it's all libraries for them now too. Even a lot of modern data structures work is just using associative maps and arrays together properly.
So I would agree that we could A: spend somewhat less time on this in the curriculum and B: tune it to more about how to use arrays and maps and less about how to bit bang efficient hash tables.
People always get frosty about trying to remove or even "tune down" the amount of time spent in a curriculum, but consider the number of things you want to add and consider that curricula are essentially zero-sum games; you can't add to them without removing something. If we phrase this in terms of "what else could we be teaching other than a fifth week on pointer-based data structures" I imagine it'll sound less horrifying to tweak this.
Not that it'll be tweaked, of course. But it'd be nice to imagine that I could live in a world where we could have reasonable discussions about what should be in them.