Poor Sedgewick: He's looking for work! Close to the terms of Steve Blank, he is looking for "product/market fit"! So far, he's a long way from finding it!
Computing is the greatest gift horse to civilization so far. Yet poor Sedgewick wants to look at this horse, strain to find a flea on its back, rush off to do a 'scientific' study of how to overcome fleas, and then scream that he has saved hackers in cubicles struggling with performance problems and has enabled the power of the gift horse for the benefit of civilization.
So he wants to "Save the world" and, thus, get praise, acceptance, approval, status, prestige, popularity, admiring Princeton coeds, lecture invitations, and book contracts! Heck, just the coeds should do! A lot of them have rich fathers who actually have done well finding product/market fit!
Part of his evidence for the value of his 'science' are enrollments in his 'computer science' courses! He interprets the enrollments as high interest in overcoming fleas instead of just using the horse!
For the science, he wants to use old Princeton heroes von Neumann, Ford, and Fulkerson.
Alas, in his steps toward science, in his first step he talks about 'randomness' and falls flat on his face in the mud. Instead, he needs to walk across campus and talk to some people who actually know how to define and work with 'randomness'; there are such people, but I will omit names here!
Then he wants to claim to use 'von Neumann's science' to dig into details of performance of Ford and Fulkerson graph problems and try to find one measure of performance "to rule them all".
Then he discovers generating functions!
Where does he get that really strong funny stuff he's been smoking?
But, the rest of us can relax: So far Sedgewick at Princeton hasn't found anything important in 'computer science' beyond some middle school course in Java!
Computing is the greatest gift horse to civilization so far. Yet poor Sedgewick wants to look at this horse, strain to find a flea on its back, rush off to do a 'scientific' study of how to overcome fleas, and then scream that he has saved hackers in cubicles struggling with performance problems and has enabled the power of the gift horse for the benefit of civilization.
So he wants to "Save the world" and, thus, get praise, acceptance, approval, status, prestige, popularity, admiring Princeton coeds, lecture invitations, and book contracts! Heck, just the coeds should do! A lot of them have rich fathers who actually have done well finding product/market fit!
Part of his evidence for the value of his 'science' are enrollments in his 'computer science' courses! He interprets the enrollments as high interest in overcoming fleas instead of just using the horse!
For the science, he wants to use old Princeton heroes von Neumann, Ford, and Fulkerson.
Alas, in his steps toward science, in his first step he talks about 'randomness' and falls flat on his face in the mud. Instead, he needs to walk across campus and talk to some people who actually know how to define and work with 'randomness'; there are such people, but I will omit names here!
Then he wants to claim to use 'von Neumann's science' to dig into details of performance of Ford and Fulkerson graph problems and try to find one measure of performance "to rule them all".
Then he discovers generating functions!
Where does he get that really strong funny stuff he's been smoking?
But, the rest of us can relax: So far Sedgewick at Princeton hasn't found anything important in 'computer science' beyond some middle school course in Java!