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Curious what modern schools teach in Computer Science programs. I went to Salisbury State University 17 years ago, and we had classes on assembly language, syst

Curious what modern schools teach in Computer Science programs. I went to Salisbury State University 17 years ago, and we had classes on assembly language, system programming and operating systems where we used C, algorithms classes with assignments in C++, computer graphics, which of course also C++. My professional experience working in industry was primarily in Java, but also some C, Python, Ruby. Learning Rust was not without a challenge, but having a lot of programming in C/C++ in school more than 10 years ago helped a lot. My assumption that all software engineers who have university degree should have some experience in system programming.

sophiabits 4y ago
At my university the language used for teaching was predominantly Java, with Python or C# used in some papers. There was an optional operating systems paper which had you writing some assembly to run on an in-house RISC system [1], but a small % of CS+SE students took that paper. I think they’re trending towards using Python for most papers now. Not unreasonable for a paper on data mining or web development, but there’s definitely something being lost where students don’t /need/ to understand how the computer’s working in order to get a passing grade, so there’s no real incentive to dig deeper for the average student. [1] https://wramp.wand.nz/ https://wramp.wand.nz/
tialaramex 4y ago
The University I work for teaches Java in Programming I (the mandatory introductory language) for Computer Scientists, and teaches them some C in Programming II and then a functional language, typically Haskell, and potentially some Rust, Typescript, whatever by the third year as some of the students will be pursuing Theory. The Electronics students learn C at the beginning meanwhile. Students elsewhere in the university learn mostly Python and R.

sophiabits 4y ago

At my university the language used for teaching was predominantly Java, with Python or C# used in some papers. There was an optional operating systems paper which had you writing some assembly to run on an in-house RISC system [1], but a small % of CS+SE students took that paper. I think they’re trending towards using Python for most papers now. Not unreasonable for a paper on data mining or web development, but there’s definitely something being lost where students don’t /need/ to understand how the computer’s working in order to get a passing grade, so there’s no real incentive to dig deeper for the average student. [1] https://wramp.wand.nz/ https://wramp.wand.nz/

tialaramex 4y ago

The University I work for teaches Java in Programming I (the mandatory introductory language) for Computer Scientists, and teaches them some C in Programming II and then a functional language, typically Haskell, and potentially some Rust, Typescript, whatever by the third year as some of the students will be pursuing Theory. The Electronics students learn C at the beginning meanwhile. Students elsewhere in the university learn mostly Python and R.