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Comment by pgbovine | Hacker News Reader

Thanks, will look into those and update accordingly. However, Harvard CS51 doesn't count as CS1 since CS50 is already its CS1 course. (But please correct me if I'm wrong.)

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(arg can't reply to your reply) this is actually quite important ... let me keep looking into this. sorry there's a giant backlog of (often angry!) emails in my inbox right now ... might not be able to sort thru them all :)

i wish the blogging platform supported some version-control friendly format.

[Edit: I made a typo about Penn CS120 ... I mistakenly found another course named CS120 that wasn't at Penn. Also, Harvard CS51 calls itself "Computer Science II" [1], implying that it's a CS2 course. It probably has CS50 as a prereq, tho I haven't double-checked yet.]

[1] http://cs51.seas.harvard.edu/docs/lectures/2013/1-overview.p...

It depends on what CS1 really means. I do think cs51 is comparable to CIS120 at Penn, and I think the later is pretty clearly CS1. That said, I find it hard to really figure out what the precise criteria are. It's pretty clear that Harvard encourages concentrators to take cs50, but I think the same course at other institutions would often be skipped by concentrators.

@yminsky -- yep, taxonomies r hard :) but i'm trying to go as much as possible by what each department proclaims for itself rather than trying to calibrate across departments. If Harvard calls a class "Computer Science II", I'm going to consider it as CS2. (fwiw I consider Harvard CS50 a hybrid of CS0 and CS1 since students voluntarily split themselves into two tracks called "less comfortable" and "more comfortable", respectively.)

I would have thought cs50 is a cs0 course, and cs51 is the cs1. cs50 is the concentrators-and-non-concentrators course that's all flash and fun. What do you think is the cs0 at Harvard?

As for your point about Penn's CS120, I guess I don't fully understand the criterion. From the way you described it, CS120 seems like a CS1 course: not for someone who has had zero programming, but the very first course taken by most CS concentrators.

FWIW, I spoke to Benjamin Pierce about the structure of the course, and he said he didn't want to use "Real World OCaml" because it's too early of a course: he has students who he thinks don't yet understand things like what a scope is. From the sense I got from him, it's quite early in the curriculum.

That said, this is mostly minor quibbling. I think there's little doubt that "very early" courses, for some reasonable definition of "very early", lean towards Python. And reasonably so.

I'm not sure how you define CS0, but my understanding is that there are now three introductory CS courses at Harvard: CS1, CS50, and CS51. Note that I graduated in 2007, so my understanding may be dated.

CS1 is intended for non-concentrators or people with very little prior CS experience.

CS50 is the standard intro course that most CS concentrators (or people considering CS as a concentration) take. Although it's taken by non-concentrators, most of the non-concentrators taking the course do so because they're in some field that has a lot of exposure to programming (e.g. Applied Math).

CS51 is the "advanced" intro course and is usually not the first CS course a CS concentrator takes, if for no other reason that it's not offered until the spring semester.

I went to Penn and TAed for some lower level CS courses (but not 120).

CIS120 is the course for students who have some programming experience, and probably falls under CS1. I had taken AP Java AB before and was overprepared for the old (Java) version of the course. The current course teaches basic data structures and uses Ocaml.

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