this post was submitted on 24 Jul 2025
226 points (96.3% liked)
Showerthoughts
36191 readers
1009 users here now
A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The most popular seem to be lighthearted clever little truths, hidden in daily life.
Here are some examples to inspire your own showerthoughts:
- Both “200” and “160” are 2 minutes in microwave math
- When you’re a kid, you don’t realize you’re also watching your mom and dad grow up.
- More dreams have been destroyed by alarm clocks than anything else
Rules
- All posts must be showerthoughts
- The entire showerthought must be in the title
- No politics
- If your topic is in a grey area, please phrase it to emphasize the fascinating aspects, not the dramatic aspects. You can do this by avoiding overly politicized terms such as "capitalism" and "communism". If you must make comparisons, you can say something is different without saying something is better/worse.
- A good place for politics is c/politicaldiscussion
- Posts must be original/unique
- Adhere to Lemmy's Code of Conduct and the TOS
If you made it this far, showerthoughts is accepting new mods. This community is generally tame so its not a lot of work, but having a few more mods would help reports get addressed a little sooner.
Whats it like to be a mod? Reports just show up as messages in your Lemmy inbox, and if a different mod has already addressed the report, the message goes away and you never worry about it.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
When I think about computer science as a field of science I think about things like algorithmic complexity. I believe things like what you mentioned should be taught in general education prior to university (or, like calculus, as an optional elective) and are only covered because you need to know those basics to cover the advanced things.
It's really difficult to come up with other examples of this that aren't contrived because computer programming is the only field I know of that's like this. I might compare it to architects needing to know how to use tools, but I don't think they actually cover that. Maybe a better example might be engineers needing to know how to use tools before designing machines. Either way, things like how to use tools aren't covered in those classes and they're either not taught or taught as shop classes (or maybe they are, I didn't go into those fields). Things like for loops I view as learning how to make a computer operate. Like how someone who drives a car doesn't need to know how to fix an engine but a mechanic does. But learning about computer science is more like learning about what car designers do than what mechanics do. A lot of programming work doesn't need that low level of attention to detail.
Like I said before, it doesn't hurt, but it's not super critical. A classic example is something like learning how to make a linked list. This is an early example of an assignment that starts to get into the actual computer science stuff because you start to talk about the comparisons between different data structures, like linked lists versus array lists. So in university you may be thinking "damn I'm gonna be making list implementations all the time" but you quickly learn, no, you're not. The standard library of your language already has one and it's worlds better than anything you made. Plus, 99% of the time you're gonna want an array list, at least in the types of work I do.
I hope that helps make it more clear what I'm trying to say. I'm not saying computer programming is easy or doesn't require skills.