Comment Academia vs Industry -- or a matter of standards? (Score 1) 583
I think academia is right to distrust "teaching to the fad" because concepts don't change, and people who know the concepts will be good at picking up the fads. Math -- to a lesser or greater extent, it's arguable -- is one of the concepts.
Analogy: if you'll be programming in Java and Python, why learn C or assembly? Don't "tough" concepts like pointers and managing your own memory turn off a lot of potentially great programmers? Well
So -- this is also about standards. What standards a student has for herself, and what standards a school wants to set for its students. You think most of the programmers hired at Google don't know calculus and linear algebra? It's not about whether you integrate functions on a daily basis, it's that (1) you've proven you're smart and those smarts often correlate with good coding, and (2) you have additional tools and a better understanding in many cases. In industry, that pays.
And to be blunt, if someone told me they hadn't had calc or probability, I would distrust their overall understanding of the field of "computer science". Nothing against their programming skills, it's just that a lot of what I call "CS" includes mathematical concepts, and I think that a CS degree should include them.