True what you say, after all, HTML was invented by a physicist-turn-CS and look at the carnage and the body count it left behind ;)

And I have to admit that I do not prefer to work with self-taught people but I think my observation stands, although it really is subjective and borders hyperbole.

the objective of university studies is to produce scientists

maybe in the 70's. Now neither students nor governments, nor companies can afford producing scientists - it seems. Not even programmers it seems also.

Anyway, I hope YourMother manages the change successfully.

Common sense is the most fairly distributed thing in the world, for each one thinks he is so well-endowed with it that even those who are hardest to satisfy in all other matters are not in the habit of desiring more of it than they already have.

--- René Descartes

;-P

Anyway, we already agreed that a diploma in CS doesn't make you a scientist nor a programmer.

You might wanna have a look at the ways me and others handled this problem:

Re: Google Code Jam 2019 Round 1A Problem 1: Pylons

While I produced a formal proof for all possible solution (using techniques I learned at university), others "solved" it much quicker with a a mix of brute force and random generators.

It really depends, what you need to invest for which outcome.

BTW: I learned programing with 14, long before entering university.

update

other example: Re: Check randomly generated numbers have not been used before

This particular poster ignored the "Birthday paradox",

• I produced the exact formula I learned at school,
• others tried it out to prove him wrong.
again depends what you need.

Cheers Rolf
_{(addicted to the Perl Programming Language :)
Wikisyntax for the Monastery FootballPerl is like chess, only without the dice}

While I produced a formal proof for all possible solution (using techniques I learned at university), others "solved" it much quicker with a a mix of brute force and random generators.

Google or whoever set the challenge made sure that "calculators are allowed", for a reason I suppose. That's my fixation with Optimisation as a social goal (Re: Curious about Perl's strengths in 2018).

I am also a self-taught programmer. Never had any formal training bar some Pascal. And at the same age as you (14), I got into my first "birthday paradox" gaffe by trying to fit 3**13 combinations of football matches into my ZX-Spectrum's 48K(bytes), too cocky by my previous success in creating an iterator for listing them. "Out of Memory" it said and I thought I reached the Edge of the Universe. But it was a lesson since.

I am not sure what's best: to make the mistakes as early or as late in life. Next time I am around I will make them as late and document the outcome. But I am not sure 42 will still be the answer...