I am flabbergasted to see Gary Taubes being named a charlatan, especially since Taubes has written a whole freakishly long response to Guynete's articles on his blog:
I don't think it is as straightforward as that. Imagine you're learning chess and you have a chess master as your teacher, you are going to annihilate someone who has putted the same amount of time, even more, but who doesn't have such a good teacher.
Thanks Eric, really appreciated for your offer. I don't know how you generally approach this but I've updated my HN account with my email.
I will continue attending the class and see if it is indeed more abstract and focused on topics like logic and visual stuff. I'll also ask a friend of mine about her experience with the class and the teacher about how the exams are handled.
Once again, thank you for your help. Really appreciated :)
I am not against using paper to do things like doing a diagram so you can understand your algorithm better and its shortcomings, and you're right, knowing how to debug on paper is important, but how do you know you have a bug if you can't test the code in a computer?
Our practice classes don't have computers on the classroom. This is not to say you can't do that at home, of course)
Yes, I should have said something about it, but it is not, at least from what I've been told, about drawing boxes and having a visual representation of your algorithm, but actually writing it on Scheme. On a piece of paper.
What if I have a small bug, like a comma, or something small like that, out of place? I'll have to ask the teacher about it.
I'm thinking of just skipping this class and learn from OpenCourseware.
http://garytaubes.com/