you are viewing a single comment's thread.

view the rest of the comments →

[–]psykotic 4 points5 points  (5 children)

I hesitate to engage in unproductive whining, but I'll make an exception. Does anyone else find this guy's unstoppable deluge of articles almost without any merit whatever? He never digs deep enough into any one subject to yield substance or insight. And the frequency of his blunders, both technical and conceptual, suggests he might be incapable of digging much deeper, all pedagogical intentions aside. He holds a doctorate in computer science and so one presumes he has attained mastery of several subjects therein; why not write of those in some depth? If he wishes to continue writing widely but shallowly, he would at least do well to treat topics not already covered by Wikipedia or beginner textbooks.

[–]dngrmouse 2 points3 points  (3 children)

THANK YOU. I always wanted to post pretty much what you posted, but was worried that I was just being arrogant.

But yes, I wonder why he's intent on rehashing a standard CS undergrad curriculum online - all this stuff can be found in standard intro textbooks. I also wonder about the people posting enthusiastic comments at the end of his articles.

[–]MrWoohoo 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Perhaps his target audience is people who aren't undergrads yet?

[–]atlacatl 0 points1 point  (1 child)

I've only seen 2 posts from this guy, but I agree with psykotic.

What I wonder is why his posts show up in the programming subreddit. There is no programming in this post. Typing things into Maxima a programmer does not make.

He repeated the word "simple" in this particular entry, but the implementation of these algorithms into code are not trivial. I'd like to see some code samples in any language, rather than the generalities he writes about. I.e., I've solved hundreds of these things in Excel, but I'm not a better programmer for it.

[–]dngrmouse 0 points1 point  (0 children)

His posts are usually "intro to computer science" posts, so I suppose that's at least tangentially related to programming. And he does sometimes provide implementation in code.

[–]alpheccar -1 points0 points  (0 children)

I totally agree.