About 20 years ago I failed out of the undergrad CS program at UIUC because I thought I was smart enough to skip most lectures. I did manage to get an A in the C++ Data Structures course because the lectures were recorded and I just binged them all the night before each test.

Anyways, now I’m a full-time lecturer teaching undergraduate CS courses (long story) and I’m actually shaping curriculum. As soon as I read this article I thought “I need to tell my data structures students to read this” because it echoes a lot of what I’ve been saying in class.

Case in point: right after two lectures covering the ArrayList versus LinkedList implementations of the Java List interface, I spent an entire lecture on JUnit and live-coded a performance test suite that produced actual data to back up our discussions of big-O complexity. The best part of all? They learned about JIT compilation in the JVM firsthand because it completely blew apart the expected test results.

> Anyways, now I’m a full-time lecturer teaching undergraduate CS courses (long story)

I would love to hear that story if you're willing to tell it.

It sounds like you're a great lecturer, though, giving the students exactly the sort of stuff they need. I remember a university lecturer explaining to us that "JIT" just meant that Java loaded the class files when it needed them, rather than loading them all at the start, so your lesson sounds like a far cry from those days!