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by pessimizer·14y ago·view on hn ↗
I definitely didn't write any HTML, CSS, or javascript in college, but I feel like I use algorithmic analysis stuff from there at least once an hour. Data structure stuff I use a bit less often, because I'm usually just using what I've been given by some framework - but if I have some huge bizarre piece of state that I'm passing around, knowing how to structure it or find what I want in it efficiently comes in handy.

Those things were a bit of a terror to learn in class, whereas the basics of HTML took a day or two, the basics of CSS took a good week or two to completely get my head around, and the worst part about javascript was getting my head around a C looking language that didn't behave at all like C. All of this was stuff I couldn't help picking up because I had to complete projects for money. Understanding how a O(n log n) algorithm looked or how fast something was going to fill up all of my ram would not have been something I learned on my own without years of experience of benchmarking and debugging, without school.

edit: I do share the experience of the author of not using any language that I used in college, since college. That's certainly not the fault of the languages, C++ and Java, which are still probably the most widely used outside of the web (well, servlets, but I hated Java.) But if it had been a .NET college teaching me how to automate Excel, I may have killed myself, though I have collected paychecks for doing just that, since.

1 comments
In a sense I have the same experience as you. I regularly use little bits of the theory we studied in college, except that I only understand that theory because it was re-taught to me by more experienced programmers at my internships/jobs. Nothing I learned in college really stuck because it wasn't taught with any context or application. Computer science was part of the engineering department at my school, so I think it's reasonable for me to expect at least some understanding of how the theory relates to real-world situations.