[learc83]

That's perfectly fine. What you're looking for is vocational training, not a liberal college education. Non professional college programs are explicitly not vocational training. If they were, they wouldn't require spending nearly half your time on general education requirements (assuming we're talking about the US here). I doubt art history, physics, or psychology has proven much direct use to you in your career.

>In fact, some of the academic stuff like compilers and automata have been useless in real life. That's a failing of academia from my point of view.

Finite state machines and pushdown automata are an incredibly common pattern, and I can't see how you can work as a professional software developer without running into that pattern time and again. Have you never used regular expressions?

Automata (usually taught along with theory of computation) teaches you all kinds of useful real world knowledge, like why you can't parse HTML with regular expressions, and why you can't write a program to tell if another program will eventually halt.

[kartickvad]

My idea of education is one that teaches you skills that are broadly used throughout your career. I don't a priori reject things that meet this criteria just because it's not based in theory (because theory is not an end to itself), or by applying arbitrary labels like "vocational" (whatever that means), "liberal" or "professional".

As for art history and psychology, that's a different debate to be had about education — whether these should be part of education and how much time they should take.

As for your question, I've used regexes, but you don't need to understand the details of the regex engine in order to use them. Neither do I, in my day-to-day work, write programs that try to tell if other programs halt.

[learc83]

>but you don't need to understand the details of the regex engine in order to use them.

Yes, at some point you do. Without understanding how regular expressions actually work, you can't know when it is appropriate to use them. Many things aren't possible with regular expressions and many grammars aren't parsable with regular expressions. You can either waste time trying to write an impossible regex (or write one that works on your tests, but blows up in the wild) or you can study automata theory and understand what actually goes on underneath.

As for the halting problem, I'll leave you this stack overflow explanation for why it is beneficial to understand.

http://cs.stackexchange.com/a/32853

Many problems in CS have already been solved, some are impossible to solve. You can either waste time on trial and error trying to reinvent the wheel or you can study the theoretical underpinnings.

Do you want to spend a week trying to model a problem as a finite state machine, only to determine that finite state machine isn't powerful enough to solve your problem?

Do you want to spend a month banging your head against a wall trying to solve a problem that you could have solved in 5 minutes had you realized it was just a well known graph theory problem all along? A problem that was solved decades ago. The only way to know these things is to study the theory behind what you do.

Why do you think Civil Engineers are required to take physics? The difference between an Engineer and an artisan is a rigorous understanding of the formal system underpinning his work. Artisans build through trial and error and experiences, and they leave many failed projects in their wake while they gain this experience. Engineers use theory and modeling to limit the number of failed projects to the net benefit of everyone involved.

[drauh]

> My idea of education is one that teaches you skills that are broadly used throughout your career. ... applying arbitrary labels like "vocational" (whatever that means)

vocational - adj. 2. (of education or training) directed at a particular occupation and its skills.

Which is exactly your idea of education. The labels are descriptive, not arbitrary.