Why aren't we all speaking LISP now?

[Delaney, Timothy]

> > Does teaching bubblesort algorthims help when most high 
> level languages have
> > highly efficent sorting routines available?
> 
> The point of teaching bubblesort isn't so that you know
> how to write a bubblesort. Studying it, together with other
> sorting algorithms such as minselect and quicksort, teaches
> you how to analyse algorithms and compare the performance
> of different algorithms for solving the same problem.

Indeed, the point of teaching bubblesort is to teach *not to use*
bubblesort. In general, teaching sorting algorithms is for learning about
algorithms and why a good algorithm is so important.

I'm not a teacher, but I have been a student ... you can really tell those
who have an interest and a future in programming/software engineering/etc -
those are the ones who, when shown that most HLLs have efficient, built-in
sorting, *don't* say "Well, why didn't you tell us that before??? What a
waste of time." Usually because they've already gone and found out ;)

Tim Delaney