> In my experience, algos are the really easy part of programming.

His point is that when you design an algorithm you need to be able to reason about why it works.

Based on the rest of your comments in this thread, it sounds to me like you have something against the mathematical background of CS? Writing code is not the same thing as doing computer science. Plenty of people are perfectly happy doing the former, but CS as an academic discipline is rooted in discrete math so any school that teaches it should also teach the background.

Ah, the old "but it's not a programming degree, it's about theory". I thought we were past that these days.

Notice how it took you just one sentence to summarise the few hundred words he wrote.

We've a fairly big problem in this industry that "qualified" CS graduates don't actually signal anything about their suitability for the profession. A significant chunk can't even fizzbuzz.

I'd suggest teaching mathematical models instead of showing loops and recursion in practical code is a large chunk of the problem.

> it took you one sentence to summarise the few hundred words he wrote.

Oh, come on. What sornaensis's one sentence summarizes is ... the one sentence at the start of my comment. It's true that his is shorter; it also gives less information.

(For the avoidance of doubt, that isn't a problem. Since you declared yourself unable to understand what I wrote, it's fair enough to try to simplify it.)

The rest of what I wrote was (1) an answer to your subsidiary question "What am I missing?" plus (2) an explanation of what I was talking about, in case it was stuff you weren't familiar with.

(Of course if I'd known you'd respond as unpleasantly as you did, I wouldn't have bothered trying to be helpful. But at the time I thought you might well be asking a sincere question rather than just wanting to vent about how out of touch those hoity-toity theoreticians are.)

I don't know how you came to the conclusion that the quality of CS graduates is poor or how that the cause of this perceived lack of quality is somehow due to courses focusing on theory. In my experience very little in a run of the mill CS undergrad program is dedicated to theory so I might come to the opposite conclusion: too many people are focused on learning how to write code with some javascript framework and not how to do computer science. So people miss important patterns and concepts because no one explained to them why they are important. Patterns you have spent years coming to understand intuitively, perhaps.

(It looks like you've been downvoted a lot. For what it's worth, it wasn't me.)

I didn't claim that CRUD apps don't have complexity in them. I claimed that CRUD apps don't typically have the sort of thing in them for which this kind of small-scale semi-formal stuff is useful in them. I am happy to stand by that claim; do you actually disagree with it?

I get the impression that you think I was being sniffy about CRUD apps. I wasn't. In particular, (1) I don't think CRUD apps are low-value. There are plenty of CRUD apps that add much more value to the world than almost any piece of code of the sort that invariants are super-helpful for. And (2) I don't think that CRUD apps are easy. Well, doubtless some are, but as you say they commonly have huge amounts of complication in them, of a sort that isn't amenable to the kind of formalized reasoning I was talking about.

To answer the implied question in your first sentence: I wasn't trying to make a point, I was giving an answer to a question you asked, namely why mathematical induction might be important for programmers.

Briefer and more explicit version of that answer: For people writing certain kinds of code, understanding mathematical induction makes it easier to reason about that code via techniques such as loop invariants, which makes it easier to make that code bullet-proof. There are many other kinds of code for which nothing closely related to mathematical induction is of any value at all.

(And, to reiterate lest I set the bee in your bonnet buzzing again: Whether a kind of code benefits from this sort of technique has basically nothing to do with how important it is, or how difficult it is to write overall, or what anyone should think of the people writing it.)