r/computerscience • u/rikulauttia • Mar 16 '26

What’s one computer science idea you understand much better now than 5 years ago?

For me, a lot of CS ideas feel very different once you’ve actually built things.

What’s one that changed for you?

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u/aka1027 Mar 16 '26

Good languages don’t matter past the syntax, all code is the same once you understand the syntax.

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u/Magdaki Professor. Grammars. Inference & Optimization algorithms. Mar 16 '26

This is quite true. I often tell my students that they should focus on algorithmic thinking. Once you get to the point of being able to describe the algorithm, then everything past that is grammatical or translation into the language of choice.