Tech layoffs keep stacking up

Re:Tech layoffs keep stacking up by InefficientRed on Friday July 01, 2022 @06:53PM (#31954057)

I know only because I volunteer in AP CS classrooms. Linked Lists are covered fairly early in the course. Doubly linked list insertion is one of the standard reversed classroom (?) labs in one of those teacher's courses (but not others; we spent more time on trees in one class and one of the teachers was quite bad and spent a hilarious quantity of time on String.format). In the DLL lab the kids do just fine in an hour or so. They do not see DLLs before that but it is the final lab of the linked lists section.

My high school did not offer CS except as an independent study (you could technically do anything as an independent study, so "offer" is shorthand for "convince a teacher to let you sit in their classroom during planning period and find a way to sit for the AP CS exam").

There have existed high school CS courses since the 80s. (The AP CS exam was introduced in 1984.)

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Re:Tech layoffs keep stacking up by Wowfunhappy on Friday July 01, 2022 @07:10PM (#31954232)

Fwiw, AP Computer Science must have gotten better.

I took AP Computer Science in High School in 2012. The whole curriculum was based on this “Grid World” Java program where a Grasshopper extends JumpingBug extends Bug or something like that, no not as an analogy for OO, the classes were literally named like this. And, the AP test asked specific questions about Grid World's implementation, so you had to learn about it even if you understood the underlying computer science concepts.

I wish we learned about linked lists. I didn’t get that until college.

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Re:Tech layoffs keep stacking up by letitbeirie on Friday July 01, 2022 @08:46PM (#31954877)

You took it after they switched to Java, which abstracts away the mechanics of collections.

Linked lists were much more fundamental (and covered much earlier) when they were using C++.

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Re:Tech layoffs keep stacking up by Wowfunhappy on Friday July 01, 2022 @09:31PM (#31955171)

Oof—I had no idea that was a thing. Especially at that age, I would have loved to learn C++, due to some misguided notions of what constitutes "real programming".

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Re:Tech layoffs keep stacking up by kcplate on Friday July 01, 2022 @09:28PM (#31955144)

My high school offered “computer math” and we had state of the art Tandy TRS-80s. Model 4s

Wasn’t too much learning about double linked lists going on in that class.

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