[dahart]

Why not? It’s a professor’s absolute prerogative what lessons they’re offering, and working in low memory is a great lesson to learn. Kids these days are lazy and spoiled with their gigabytes of ram and terabytes of disk. In my day… wait, never mind, I’m starting to sound old, eh?

The flip side question to you is, why should students get away with more than they need? Memory and cycles are wasting energy. We need engineers to understand how to be deeply efficient, not careless with resources. Memory is generally much more expensive than compute cycles in terms of energy use. Yes, please, teach the students how to program with less memory.

Low memory programming is a fantastic exercise for learning modern GPU programming, since you still need to conserve individual bytes when you’re trying to run ten thousand threads at the same time. Or if you’re just into Arduinos.

Other lessons that are great to learn, but take time to appreciate are how to avoid using any dynamic memory, how to avoid recursion, how to avoid function pointers or any of today’s tricky constructs (closures/futures/monads/y-combinators/etc.) I’m of course referring to how some people (like NASA) think of safety critical code https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Power_of_10:_Rules_for_Dev... But I will add that many of these rules have applied to console video game programming for a long time. They’re easing up lately, but the concepts still apply since coding for a console is effectively embedded programming.

[adgjlsfhk1]

One reason is that one of the main resources students should learn to be efficient with is their time. There are definitely places where low memory use is important, but 95% of the time, the first place you should go is to use all the tricks you have to make writing code faster. Knowing how to be careful with precision is great, but so is just using Double (or even BigFloat) to get something that will work robustly without having to analyze as carefully.

[dahart]

I agree students should learn how to be efficient with their time to learn the concepts they need to learn and pass the courses they choose to take in the school they’re choosing to attend, knowing the lessons are going to help them in their future careers. If a student thinks learning how floats work isn’t valuable, Computer Science might not be their thing.

It’s not the professor’s job to minimize the student’s effort, it’s the student’s job. The arrangement is the opposite of your implication. The professor’s job is to get lazy students to confront and learn these concepts and have them practice enough to understand the concepts. Having to analyze carefully is the whole point.

I also agree about the first place you should go is to use all the tricks you have to make writing code faster… at least in business. I’m not sure that applies in school. But either way, this is precisely why school should have students practice things like floating point analysis and low-memory programming until they are part of the students’ bag of tricks, until they can do high quality engineering fluently.

BTW, just using doubles in the name of not having to analyze is not particularly great outside of school either. That does not fly where I work now (on GPU ray tracing), and would not have been acceptable when I worked in CG films or video games either. You might be underestimating how expensive doubles are. If you don’t know whether you need doubles, you probably don’t. If you have a problem that needs more than floats, and accuracy is that important, then you’ll need to justify why doubles are enough, so in practice you’ll have to analyze carefully anyway.

Maybe you’re just teasing me with the BigFloat suggestion, I can’t tell. Since they might be orders of magnitude slower than floats, they’re rarely justifiable as a robustness replacement, especially by someone who hasn’t analyzed carefully. That might be a firing offense at some jobs if done more than once. :P