[dozzie]

> Nobody [...] writes fundamental algorithms, you use libraries and classes from the language you're working in. Most people don't work in compiled languages anymore, and if they do, they don't write their own compilers.

This is sad thing to say. I'm a sysadmin, and I'm regularly using the knowledge about algorithms to assess which data structure to use in my programs, I've written recently a binary search function (if we're talking about fundamentals), more than once I needed to write a priority queue that allows fast(er than O(n)) updates to random elements, and I assure you that I'm very happy that I took the compilers course, because I've written several parsers (one more interesting was a translator from a simple query language to SQL, to easily extract data from inventory database). And I am a sysadmin, I'm not supposed to write that much. What went wrong?