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Comment by bloaf | Hacker News Reader

In which departments have you seen that? [Not denying, genuinely curious]

i've seen some pretty shitty grad students but i don't really blame the grad school. a lot of non-cs undergrads go into cs grad programs with barely any programming experience. in my experience, the grad programs don't teach them the fundamentals (assuming they know them) but instead teach very specific niche areas. They end up never learning basic programming fundamentals.

If someone is studying computability or formal languages or algorithms or ML in a CS department, they don't really need to be programmers.

My sister is a graduate student in Neuropsychology. As part of her graduate program, she was required to take a programming class; because programming is an important tool that she needs to be able to use to do her research.

Simmilarly, most research in CS will involve using programming as a tool, even if it is not the final product. The problem is that in CS, no one thinks to require the graduate students to take basic programming classes.

> As part of her graduate program, she was required to take a programming class; because programming is an important tool that she needs to be able to use to do her research.

But for students focusing in complexity, they may not need to program at all, so naturally it makes sense there would not be much emphasis on programming.

in my opinion they don't need to BE programmers but they need to be ABLE to program.

http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=398

relevant song by scott aaronson

Obligatory coding horror reference:

https://blog.codinghorror.com/why-cant-programmers-program/

I'm in physics/chemistry/materials fields. I've been around several 'world-class' institutions in the UK and USA, and had mixed experiences -- far more mixed than you'd think looking at simple rankings. I wouldn't like to draw any hard conclusions though, because I only have anecdotes, but perhaps others can comment.

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