There is a difference between knowing what a meal tastes like, and how to cook it.
What you are arguing for is knowledge of what meals taste like (e.g. two primary taste dimensions being space and time). I think this is really useful; so I agree with you.
But what Colin (and I mean OP) is asking for is knowledge of how to cook two specific meals, themselves rarely asked for.
I personally think CS education is mostly useless. Big-O notation and a survey of the field (a taste test of the meals, if you will) are all you really need bring along with you from discrete math, in my very humble opinion.
Cooking some of the meals while learning will teach you the general skill of following a recipe; a few more applied challenges will develop your improvisation skills. But the more applied it gets, the less CS it is.
The field is too broad, IMHO, for deeper knowledge of only a handful of things to be very useful. I know a lot about hash tables, for example, but that's because they were very useful in my job, and critical for performance. It would be a waste of time for me to know as much as I know about them now, coming out of college, never mind 10+ years later. I wouldn't come down like a ton of bricks on a recent graduate for not being able to name 3 different collision resolution approaches off the top of his head, never mind someone 10+ years out; even for a job that required their use and impromptu implementation, as mine did.
Have you considered that it's teaching you a way to think outside of your normal range, so that you can comprehend and imagine more complex designs that are easier to build and maintain?
What you are arguing for is knowledge of what meals taste like (e.g. two primary taste dimensions being space and time). I think this is really useful; so I agree with you.
But what Colin (and I mean OP) is asking for is knowledge of how to cook two specific meals, themselves rarely asked for.
I personally think CS education is mostly useless. Big-O notation and a survey of the field (a taste test of the meals, if you will) are all you really need bring along with you from discrete math, in my very humble opinion.
Cooking some of the meals while learning will teach you the general skill of following a recipe; a few more applied challenges will develop your improvisation skills. But the more applied it gets, the less CS it is.
The field is too broad, IMHO, for deeper knowledge of only a handful of things to be very useful. I know a lot about hash tables, for example, but that's because they were very useful in my job, and critical for performance. It would be a waste of time for me to know as much as I know about them now, coming out of college, never mind 10+ years later. I wouldn't come down like a ton of bricks on a recent graduate for not being able to name 3 different collision resolution approaches off the top of his head, never mind someone 10+ years out; even for a job that required their use and impromptu implementation, as mine did.