The fuck is the point of college for Computer Science and Programming?

>>8629129
>Computer Science = Codemonkey

Wrong. You're a loser and will always be considered a lower class to an experienced compscientist.

>be in Chem.E.
>have to take a CS class as a gen ed requirement
>spend two weeks learning how to convert bases of numbers
literally what the fuck was the point of that?

>>8629179
>literally what the fuck was the point of that?

Whatever college you are in prefers teaching people memes and giving out busy work instead of letting people actually learn some programming languages and make some actual programs.

>>8629129

You're talking about software engineers not computer scientists, computer science has nothing to do with computers.

As to why you'd want programmers to attend college, it's a guarantee of a certain basic standard of ability. Programming should probably be a trade diploma instead of a college degree but that's just semantics.

>>8629218
I don't know, maybe it's just to meme kids and add artificial difficulty to the class so they fail. Why the fuck do I need to know how to convert a number from base 16 to binary?

>>8629129

Programming is a tiny proportion of computer science.

I studied mathematics with physics at university, but I looked through the computer science syllabus (which was an option) and it was basically a branch of mathematics.

As well as mathematical subjects, there were so many theoretical computer science courses, computational / mathematical linguistics, computer vision, computational biology and bioinformatics, artificial intelligence, digital signal processing, quantum computing and various other subjects.

>>8629235
It's less about being able to do the conversion itself and more about helping a student to grasp binary and hexadecimal.

That said some classes do spend entirely too much time on the subject.

>>8629129
>Whereas if you waste your time going to college, you'll barely be getting into C++ by your second year, and there very little real world experience to actually teach you how to be a practical programmer.
My school requires grads to have 2 years of paid intern/co-op experience by the time they graduate. Go away, computer science/software engineering is fun and enjoyable to study in university.

>>8629129

Yeah, I got a very nice degree at a private school and kind of regret it.

The only big difference is brand. College was never about skills or learning. If you think so, then I think you are fooling yourself.

>>8629179
Bitshifts are pretty useful in a lot of algorithms, Pipe-chan. Two weeks sounds like a lot though, could probably be covered in 1/3 of a lecture.

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6KB, 256x256px

>>8629235

Computers use binary (base 2) but different CPUs will have different "word sizes" which is the size in bits of the registers on the chip. But memory addresses point to single bytes and often times one chip will have different word sizes. Plus it gets tiresome programming assembly when you type 32 1s and 0s every time you need to specify a constant. Computer programmers use different 2-adic bases and have to convert between them often

Octal/hex/binary/base 64 : programming :: meters/centimeters/millimeters : carpentry

serious programmers (people who understand assembly/CPUs) need to answer questions such as:

> how big of an int do I need to store this number?
> how can I specify 10 constants without hitting 1 and 0 64*10 times?
> if I have a computer this fast and each pixel is 3 bytes and the screen is X by Y how fast can the screen update?
> What is this unknown binary? Does it look compressed? is it ascii? assembly (do you recognize the opcodes)? did someone write "beefc0ffee" because they were expecting me to read it?

Different bases have different uses.

also there is an entire world of bitwise mathematics. That's the essence of computer science. It's about the complex math that arises when you do bitwise operations

It's bullshit you had to know that as chemical engineer, though.

>>8629129
>Java and C#
>HTML and Javascript

>>>/g/et the fuck >>>/out/

>>8629129
Software development is more than applying themes to WordPress sites. Wait until a bank loses money because some idiot didn't never heard of IEEE 754 and thinks computers always compute exact answers and then lump all programming problems into the same clay.

Programming is like bridge building. Want a small bridge over a five foot wide stream in your backyard? Pick up some illiterate day laborers off the street. Want to build a double deck cable stayed bridge a few km long? The guys in the Home Depot parking lot aren't going to be much help.

Likewise you can grab any code monkey to glue several frameworks together to make a web app clone. Now try to create an online service with several million simultaneous connections at six sigma reliability using the same code camp graduates. Things are going to get ugly.

>>8629129
Well, in my country college is free so...

>>8629269
>Bitshifts
What the fuck do bitshifts have to do with changing bases?

>>8629179
>spend two weeks learning how to convert bases of numbers

Please tell me this is an exageration and that you actually got into the deep number theoretic theory of bases and were proving the basis representation theorem and shit.

>>8629341
>What the fuck do bitshifts have to do with changing bases?
There are a lot of fast algorithms dependent on representations of numbers in different bases combined with some clever bit twiddling hacks.

I doubt that's what his course was about though, was probably just filler.

>>8629129
I've just spent 2 hours explaining to a Pure Math graduate why having two cashiers attending a single queue does not necessarily halve the average waiting time. Please, tell me more about how everything CS people do, mathies do better