As a toy example showing that knowing even just basic ideas and techniques from this area can be useful, play around with designing a purely functional algorithm for the Stable Marriage Problem. Please report back if you come up with something efficient :)
Of course, we would have to agree on the target audience to make sense of what useful means.
Linux + Opera here: After one has inputted a fifth line, the window will scroll to the top whenever one presses a key to type a statement.
I appreciate the effort by people creating repls for various languages. It was a similar repl for Haskell that was my entry point into Haskell and the wonderful world of functional programming.
I did not like that quote. For the first part: Beginners absolutely do not play be ear unless he by playing by ear means: Make instrument produce note. Continue by trial and error until complete string of notes resembles desired tune. There is a difference between "doodling" on your instrument and playing by ear. The last part: "they realize that music really is about what you hear and not what you see" is just fluff. And sheet music can just be played and sound good, this is dependent on the skill level of who is playing it. It is like saying code can only be well written after it has been refactored.
Howdy, professional musician here. I both agree and disagree with you, but I definitely disagree with the OP. "Playing by ear" is a way of learning new music, and it is a skill. Beginners do use the trial and error method you describe, and as you get better at it, you can rely more on your knowledge of what an interval sounds like, getting closer to what you hear on the first try.
Reading music is also a way of learning a piece, and for complex music (i.e., most classical music) it is the most effective way of learning music quickly, even if you're the most advanced player in the world.
I would contend, however, that "they realize that music really is about what you hear and not what you see" is not just fluff. Intermediate to advanced players are frequently very tied to the page. They tend to think in notes and barlines, which is a reflection of intermediate level training that usually focuses on rendering literally what is on the page. One of the big advancements that musicians tend to make at conservatory is to learn how to think in audible units -- phrases and gestures -- rather than the visual units they see on the page. So yes, expert musicians do rely on their ear in a way that they usually do not at intermediate level. However, it also has nothing to do with the way untrained beginners use their ear, as a way of learning music.
EDIT: A more useful analogy for musicians would be to look at how they approach the physical aspects of playing. In the beginning, a string player is taught to move the bow by moving their arm back and forth. Once they get the hang of this, they spend a decade or so dissecting the fine details of that movement: fingers, wrist, elbow, shoulder. Making the bow change directions becomes a complex dance of many choreographed movements. Eventually, though, it all becomes second nature. When an expert thinks of moving their arm back and forth, it is a shorthand for all the things they've internalized about how to use the bow.
This is similar to the martial arts idea of learning technique and then forgetting it. It is most emphatically not, however, coming around to realize that your original conception of how to play was more right than what you were doing as a journeyman.
Hmm, upon looking at the quote again it really isn't that great. When I say "played" I mean just getting the notes right at the right time - no other of the many dimensions that can change based on the player's skill level. When a skilled musician is reading sheet music, I think they're doing more than just straight playing through it (again using my definition of play, maybe a bad word choice?)
It would be interesting to see an explicit example of
"In the area of query planning and optimization, I found that at some point I hit a wall with what I could do in Java. There was latent abstraction that I understood but could not express in the code."
There is a huge difference between Denmark and Finland both in the quality of the education a coming elementary school teacher goes through and perhaps more important in the level of applicants that are accepted for the education. In 2010 for many of the schools in Denmark where you can become a teacher there were no requirements on your grades from "gymnasiet" (equivalent of high school), you only had to have passed gymnasiet. In Denmark, coming teachers choose 2 or 3 subjects that will be there main subjects. For these subjects there are some requirements, unfortunately these are ridiculously low. In gymnasiet all subjects have a level A, B or C which indicates how deeply the subject is covered. Some subjects eg. Danish and history are mandatory and exists only in the highest level A form while others eg. languages, biology, physics, math, exist in usually at least two of the levels and depending on your choice of line you can choose different levels with the requirement that when finishing you must have had 2 non-mandatory A level subjects. To choose eg. nature & technique, a subject supposed to encompass physics, chemistry, biology and geography, as one of your main subjects when becoming an elementary school teacher, it is sufficient to have the medium grade in just a single of a list of subjects that are related to natural sciences and this only had to be on the middle B level.
Another problem is that until 2007 the "seminars", the schools for educating teachers, were mainly relics from the late sixties, this having all the obvious implications given the hippie
state of DK in those years.
Also in DK through all levels of the educational system from elementary school through university, the main focus is on the students who are at the bottom of the skill spectrum.
This comment will probably never be read, but nevertheless ...
I am a Frenchman living in the Netherlands. And you are both correct and incorrect ...
The Dutch are probably among the most fluent non-native English speakers in Europe, BUT, they speak for most of them a "good enough" English, and not at all a perfect English.
This usually materializes even more when they are writing.
There is even several books (usually written by Dutch authors themselves) making fun of "dutchisms".
That said, I don't necessarily consider myself better ... Simply, I do other kind of mistakes, so their mistakes usually strike me more than my own mistakes of course, but mistakes of other French speakers as well
While most of the Dutch people I've heard speak did so with perfectly fluent English (and American accents -- thank you, Hollywood), you're unwittingly assuming he's relatively young -- my understanding is that, not surprisingly, levels of English fluency drop off somewhat rapidly with age in the current Dutch population.
Is it clear whether these open courses will be repeated in the future or if they are mainly tests before starting to charge ?
It is wonderful that they are freely available but can it really be a permanent thing and what does Stanford gain ?
Life is fine without Dorkbook. Never used it and hopefully never will, although it is getting harder and harder as my school has started to actively use it for e.g. communication regarding potential jobs for students and graduates in companies and institutions the school cooperates with.
So you would like to have had eg. any useful non-obvious algorithm or data structure which at some point in history was novel been patented ? Yikes.