Comment by RandomThoughts3 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by RandomThoughts3 | Hacker News Reader

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RandomThoughts3

Same feeling. The list is a good start but a ton is missing. I’m not American but the first 4 years of my degree had:

- a lot more maths - really a lot - what’s here doesn’t come close to covering what we did in the first year alone. For a CS degree, I would at least expect far more algebra, some graph theory, a course on optimisation and dynamic programming, some PDE and a course on numerical methods and algorithms and some formal logic (but from what I saw when I did my post-grad the amount of maths done in my country for a CS engineering degree goes further than a maths bachelor in the US so I’m extremely biased).

- Compiler and some language theory

- a course on logic programming, another on functional programming

- a course on assembly and low level programming

- a course on Networks and systems

- a course on databases architecture

- on top of a ton of physics and courses not directly oriented towards CS but required to be an engineer here.

> what’s here doesn’t come close to covering what we did in the first year alone

This varies widely by University. The Git repo matches my experience pretty well except I also had Calc II and Discrete Mathematics.

> a course on logic programming, another on functional programming

This was already in the Git repo when I looked. I think the "Programming Languages" from University of Washington Courses cover that. Specifically "Programming Languages, Part C"... though it doesn't mention Common Lisp or Scheme and uses a lot of Ruby, which is an odd choice (IMHO).

CompEng and CompSci are different degrees here, there is often some overlap, but a lot of schools, the most math you need for Comp Sci is calc 2 and stats. It also depends on the institution, some of them go hard for compilers and lower level stuff, and some of them barely touch on it or save it for their masters programs.

I had a course my CS senior year in formal languages and automata theory over 20 years ago in the US.

Graph theory wasn’t covered. We had Calc 2, Statistics, Linear Algebra, Differential Equations and Logic. Assembly, Fortran, Java, JavaScript, Standard ML, Ada and C++ were covered.

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