> if somebody is taking linear algebra in university and still didn't understand that this is an extremely important topic, then he should maybe go back to school or take a gap year or something to improve his general education.

raises hand

I was that kid.

I had to take differential equations, linear algebra, and discrete systems for my CS undergrad. I loved math, and I did my best but I eventually got bogged down and lost interest.

Since then I’ve come to appreciate more why you would want that advanced math as a programmer, but my experience at the time was that I could brute force almost anything with enough for-loops.

It just didn’t occur to me that there were interesting problems that were too complex to brute force, or that brute force would lead to such tangled code in some cases that it wouldn’t be debuggable.

Frankly, I doubt more liberal arts would’ve convinced me. I needed to get knee deep in big bad code and domain specific problems before I’d realize what I missed.