We aren't talking about "the algorithms", and to be honest the way you keep referring to "algorithms", rather than a phrase like "algorithmic thinking", is indicative of the real disconnect here. Spewing quicksort at a problem is easy and doesn't require one to really understand it in the first place, and if that's why I said "two years" I'd be totally an idiot. But it wasn't. Two years of instruction is for the mathematics and logic to understand algorithmic thinking at a level where you can reason about problems and approach them from a compositional, mathematical perspective--and that is invaluable when your problem is more than "order a list to splat into HTML". It's not high-school mathematics at all, except for the ten-thousand-foot-view.
I have yet to meet a--what's the phrase that everyone loves, "autodidact"?--who was as comfortable with higher-order computational thinking as many of the people I've worked with. Hell, I wish I had more of a mathematical and CS background than I do. Paxos and the like are still really hard to me!
We aren't talking about "the algorithms", and to be honest the way you keep referring to "algorithms", rather than a phrase like "algorithmic thinking", is indicative of the real disconnect here. Spewing quicksort at a problem is easy and doesn't require one to really understand it in the first place, and if that's why I said "two years" I'd be totally an idiot. But it wasn't. Two years of instruction is for the mathematics and logic to understand algorithmic thinking at a level where you can reason about problems and approach them from a compositional, mathematical perspective--and that is invaluable when your problem is more than "order a list to splat into HTML". It's not high-school mathematics at all, except for the ten-thousand-foot-view.
I have yet to meet a--what's the phrase that everyone loves, "autodidact"?--who was as comfortable with higher-order computational thinking as many of the people I've worked with. Hell, I wish I had more of a mathematical and CS background than I do. Paxos and the like are still really hard to me!