Subj : Re: Question about minimal requirements in programming
To   : comp.programming
From : gds
Date : Tue Jul 05 2005 09:08 pm

"John" <pls@respond.to.the.group.com> wrote:
>Are the minimal requirements in those threads shared by everybody?
>
>Does everybody here believe you must know Knuth inside and out in order to
>write effective business applications?
>
>Because in all honesty, in all the places I've worked, meeting about 50
>other programmers.  Probably less than half would even know what "know Knuth
>inside and out" means.  And nobody I've met has read them.

This reminds me of a thread way way back in the day (surprisingly, on
soc.singles), where someone complained that BSD code written by grad
students was poor, wouldn't pass lint, etc.  The complainer also
indicated that the grad students should be able to do all the problems
in Knuth.

Personally, I don't know of anyone (except perhaps algorithms
researchers) who can do all the problems in Knuth.  Some are quite
difficult, ie. they are open.  Moreover, aside from algorithms
researchers, most people would not have the time.

A couple of years after that thread, I took an algorithms class at
Stanford.  It wasn't taught by Knuth, nor did it use his texts.  It
was taught by a new professor and used a beta copy of Cormen's
algorithms text.  I made a valiant effort to do as many of the
problems as possible (easier to accomplish because it was the only
class I was taking).  I couldn't do all of them.  Some of them I was
able to get help with on the net, because the TAs were of little help.
(These weren't homework problems; I was doing these on my own.)  The
effect was somewhat positive; I didn't get an A, but there were some
exam problems I was able to get totally right.  (Unfortunately now, I
don't remember how to do most of the problems; this all took place
over 15 years ago.)

FWIW, I think it's probably more useful to understand your clients'
needs and be able to implement them cost-effectively than to be able
to do all the problems in Knuth.  Of course, being able to do some
problems in Knuth may help in that regard; those are the problems you
should probably focus on.  (In my algorithms class, we spent a lot of
time on hashing algorithms, which was very useful to me as I had a
project at work that used various hashing algorithms; probably not too
much of a surprise that I got full credit on the hashing exam problem
since it was on my mind a lot.)

--gregbo
gds at best dot com

.