Epicycles are only a rough approximation that doesn't work very well, and it doesn't in any way give you Kepler's third law (that there's a relationship between the orbits). I'm also confused in that even if that were the case it wouldn't make or Kepler or Newton's mechanics worthless. What point are you trying to make?
Epicycles can give you arbitrary precision if you use enough of them... It is quite similar to Fourier transform.
My point is that in most cases you can disassemble a 767 into various colections of parts.
Did computer programming make you a clearer, more precise thinker? How about mathematics? If so, what kind? Set theory? Probability theory?
Microeconomics? Poker? English? Civil Engineering? Underwater Basket Weaving? (For adding... depth.)
Anything I missed?
Context: I have a palette of courses to dab onto my university schedule, and I don't know which ones to chose. This much is for certain: I want to come out of university as a problem solving beast. If there are fields of inquiry whose methods easily transfer to other fields, it is those fields that I want to learn in, at least initially.
Rip apart, Less Wrong!