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Comment by clw8 | Hacker News Reader

I went to a "Public Ivy" about ten years ago and at the time both CE and CS students started with C, CE students sticking with it and CS students moving on to Java. Is this still true for the average public school? Learning C and various Assembly languages and using them to program micros is where everything finally clicked for me. Rust is lovely but I don't ever see it being the CS101 language because of elegant but difficult concepts like lifetimes.

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> at the time both CE and CS students started with C

I was confused there for a second because both "CE" and "CS" literally start with C.

By the way, to add another datapoint, I completed a bachelor degree in CS from 2012-2017 (part-time) at a German university, and we used:

- C in the first-semester "algorithms and datastructures" course

- Haskell in the second-semester "programming" course

- Java in the third-semester "software design" course and accompanying fourth-semester lab course

- Python (very briefly) in the fifth-semester "information retrieval" course

My university back in the mid-90's taught Pascal, C++, Smalltalk, Prolog, x86 and MIPS Assembly, Caml Light, PL/SQL, and started doing Java on last year there.

Those picking up the optional compiler related lectures, also got an overview around Lisp, Algol, Fortran, Concurrent C, Objective-C, ML, Cobol, Oberon, Modula-2.

Nowhere C was taught as such, we were expected to know about it from the C++ lectures.

UW does Java for both CS and CE and has done since the 00's. There was one optional C and unix class while I was there. Also one mandatory "programming languages" class that introduced functional languages and lisp.

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