They did eventually realize that teaching some of the basics would actually make for more successful students, and better alumni donations.
In the end, the CS Dept. started offering these things as zero-credit courses as a way to square the circle.
I don't know how people coming in not having sunk thousands of hours into computer crap before entering a CS major don't drown in a hurry. It'd be like starting a creative writing degree in a world where reading & writing aren't taught in school, except maybe as a one-semester high school elective, and you're just expected to have picked them up on your own time by age 18, if you're going to be a creative writing major. "OK, you're familiar with stories from watching TV, but now you're going to need to read and write them. If you can't read them here's a book(!) to help you learn to read, in you own time. Good luck anyone who wasn't already a long-time reading-and-writing nerd before choosing this major".
Of course some of the problem is that CS programs use computers so much. Which I know may seem like a silly complaint, but I think the fundamental issue is CS-the-science being mashed together with what's really a vocational program (which is what 99+% of students and employers actually want out of it, and its being "real" CS is mostly just an IQ filter). I imagine if you go into, say, a junior college HVAC program not knowing which is the business end of a screwdriver, you'd also be at a big disadvantage compared with most of your peers, and probably feel really out-of-place for quite a while.
I took MIT's "Intro" to Programming and Algorithms I think it was called (6.001). I'm not a professional developer but I've written a fair bit of code including Python which is what the class used. I'm pretty sure that, as an undergraduate, had I never seriously used a computer command line before, there is no way I could have gotten through that course.
The same dynamic is largely missing from other engineering courses, as well as the sciences, which don't really expect more than high school classroom work, an interest, and general aptitude.
And it's certainly true that CS (the math degree) gets munged with CS (the engineering degree). MIT's a bit more engineering focused (the degree is in the engineering school). There are also some variants of the degree that are more or less engineering-centric.
You're not going to meet that kind of abrupt and early resistance on the path to becoming a doctor because you didn't spend tons of your free time as far back as junior high reading anatomy books or practicing dissection, for instance.
Again, there are almost certainly other factors, and correlation is not causation, but there is at least logical correlation.
To your broader point, a lot of kids enter college with only a broad idea of what they want to do. And high school courses don't really offer much guidance. High school science classes have very little to do with their counterparts at good colleges.
[1] https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/chart-of-the-day-the-declinin...
Meanwhile there are definitely a lot of gatekeeping-assumptions about childhood interests in modern CS programs, which one would expect to have gotten stronger as more and more freshmen actually could have had experience with computers on their own—so, starting with late-80s freshmen, mostly, with the effect getting stronger fast after that. That lines up so well with the data on CS-program-enrollment-by-sex that it seems to me like the factor to examine before we go looking for other explanations. Again, to be excessively explicit due to the topic, I mean this in terms of accounting for the gender gap in programming, not in terms of addressing any other issues of sexism in the industry, which I am not denying exist.
It's much more inclusive indeed. If you can afford the mandatory completely unrelated undergrad you need to have completed to even apply to med school and the travel fees to attend your in-person interviews of course.
No, instead it's unrelated to the field so you can grind fractions of GPAs against other applicants. At least, CS is kind enough to let everyone try the real thing.
They don't call it the firehose for nothing. [0]
There's been some research on this and places like Harvey Mudd solve this basically by dividing the incoming freshmen into 'has any experience at all programming' and 'completely new', which was like 50-50 if I recall. And then tweaking assignments to not be video game focused -- pulling in problems & themes from bioinformatics and other fields instead.
Our only program of any significance in CS101 was a space invaders clone, but because we were so inexperienced, they provided a project template where we really just had to fill in some methods with a bunch of for-loops. When we got to the later courses and had to write our programs from scratch, we really had no idea where to begin because the 101 coursework had done all of that for us.
The video game assignments were asinine because they were beyond our skill level to do from scratch, so their templates handled all the I/O for us and that part of the program was treated like a bunch of magical incantations. As a result, we never fully internalized how all the moving parts fit together, and it kept us from learning useful stuff like how to read/write from files or execute system commands.
Difficulty of any given program at the undergraduate level is completely dependent on university policy. Maybe at the research level, you truly need to be more intelligent / harder working / whatever to succeed in math than in art history, but at the college level, you could do for instance:
- cram all that is taught in current undergrad, MA, and PhD (including the thesis) for art history in 4 years
- let CS students graduate if they can write any working program in any language of their choice
Tada! Art history is now the hardest degree in the college where only the best students aren't weeded out out; and CS is the easiest degree there is.
My point being that CS departments assuming prior levels of CS unlike other departments is merely an instance of a larger pattern.
I'm sure it would be considered a laughable course to teach at an elite school today. (OK. It was a bit harder because we were using punch cards and we had to beg for more computer cycles if we made too many typing errors, but still.) But I'm pretty sure it wasn't because we were a lot dumber back then.
I agree with your basic point though some students do freeze up with even relatively easy math. But, yes, you could put together a relatively easy programming course and call it CS. And liberal arts courses are not necessarily easy today--especially at a good school. You'll be doing lots of reading and writing.
That's the opposite of my point, really.
> And liberal arts courses are not necessarily easy today--especially at a good school. You'll be doing lots of reading and writing.
My point was about the "within university" variance of student levels rather than the "between university" variance. I have no doubt that a liberal arts programs in a good university is more selective than the CS program at a particularly non selective university. However, within any given college, I'd be surprised if the liberal arts program manage to get the above average students and the CS/Math/... programs get the below average students.
It wasn't until I got past the first few java heavy intro courses that I realized I had a huge leg up on a lot of the other students that only had experience with Windows or Mac. Before that I felt like I was behind behind the curve because I was stubbornly writing Java in emacs because I couldn't stand how dogshit slow Eclipse was, so I didn't have the advantage of the code-completion or project management features.
Looking back on it, the curriculum was actually just holding most students back even further and by using emacs and managing my projects from the command line, I was just increasing the lead I already had over students that didn't have linux experience.
It is very sad that we need to take two entry level programming language classes in the first year. My university does not allow me to remove it as it's the pre-requisite of pretty much everything else. And I can't "prove" that I know Java, which I didn't but I'm confident that I can get the basics going in one day and the basic-medium stuffs in a week because I already know some C, C++ and Python.
The only class that I think should teach programming languages should be a PL class. An introductive one usually teaches three or more languages in one shot with each an example of a paradigm.
BTW the zero-credit courses sound like an excellent idea. Students do not get credits but still get education out of them. It's a great practice.
Java as a language is actually tiny. So are most languages. Most of the pain is in the tools, build chains, and libraries that go along with them. Also sometimes what works very well in one lang is a pain in another. For example the dictionary in python has no real equivalent in C, unless you use some lib or write something yourself. In java you would need a map or hashmap class and knowing it exists sometimes is the biggest hurdle. But at least it is in the std library. So sometimes those sharp edges bite students as they are first starting with new langs and have decent exp in another language.
SCIP (well loved on HN) was designed for as the introductory class for freshpersons who'd never seen a computer before (which was the default case when the course was designed).
The first lecture was about how to program in lisp, using the example of symbolic differentiation. That one lecture was 100% of the introduction to computers and programming: the rest of the semester was spent on computer science.
[EDIT] incidentally, the arts are also infamous for being dominated, at a professional level, by kids with artist parents and kids with rich parents (who can bankroll years of private lessons and then years of little-to-no income while paying for access to career-makers) so... there's that.
Of the 22 people in the class, 21 of them were singers - everyone except me. Much of the class was around singing - singing scales, etc. I saw nothing in the syllabus that required singing, but... you had to learn to sing stuff by sight reading, and... I'm not a singer. It was embarrassing for me (and probably for others). I think I managed to drop out before losing all my money on that, but... frustrating. Could also tell most of these people had had voice lessons for years, and were all taking this class as a way of getting in to theater work, not... to play an instrument.
That feels roughly analogous to a CS department requiring a "*nix skills" course or similar, as most liberal arts degrees require a substantial amount of writing.
I assume music (and possibly some fine arts) would require some background in those subjects. They often require a portfolio or audition before entering the program.
Do engineering programs expect students to have taken calculus?
Though with music (and possibly engineering), you likely have to prove ability prior to being accepted into the program.
Since the 70s, AI was dominated by lisps and nearly everybody was driving at "general" AI by emulating or even attempting to simulate human thought processes.
In the 00s people started putting more weight behind statistical / stochastic methods for arriving at answers without necessarily trying to use any model of human cognition. This was called "data mining" and then "machine learning" (partly, I presume, to distance it from the 40 years of academia's dismal failure to produce working AI) and only in the last ~5 years has it come around to people starting to use the term "artificial intelligence" again.
In the early days of the revamp, it was common to see janky perl and fortran and not much structure holding it all together. Lately, I gather, the ecosystem is nearly entirely python-centric, but this is due to the gravity well around pandas. There's nothing in particular about python that makes it suitable to the task, though it is happily more approachable/accessible for academics than if a pandas equivalent had instead evolved in C++ or Java.