I went to Caltech when they were contemplating similar things in the CS curriculum, although the normal curriculum was less radical than Northeastern's seems to be.
There is a tension here that is being understated which is that people of every major now take the intro-level CS class because programming is integral to everything. Teaching algorithm design in that class is not particularly useful to a biologist who just wants to be able to cobble something together to analyze some data (usually in Python). As a result, the non-computer-scientists and non-software-engineers at the school would rather have a curriculum that is more "practical" and directly applies to research (or later class projects) the students might be doing.
Some time not far in the future, we are going to accept that this is not the same thing at all as computer science and give the computer scientists a curriculum that is a lot heavier on math and theory while adding elective or core courses for non-major students on programming. That will end the compromised state that intro CS courses currently sit in. Right now, there isn't enough teaching talent to run those non-core courses (because that talent is earning the big bucks doing something else).
> There is a tension here that is being understated which is that people of every major now take the intro-level CS class because programming is integral to everything.
Why doesn’t the CS department have a different intro class for CS majors and non-CS majors.
That’s a common practice in the mathematics, physics, etc. departments.
(To have harder intro classes for the students majoring in your department vs those who don’t.)
This is how physics is now. You teach an intro physics class and you have a billion engineering students all telling you what they actually need to know to be an engineer. But the truth is, it is often impossible to anticipate what a person needs to know for their future. The future is not an easy thing to predict despite recent innovations in AI and machine learning. And a student's current motivation is not necessarily the most important thing to consider when thinking about what they should be currently learning. People often change majors, career paths, etc. This is why I would rather people learn about topics that are fundamental to various fields, such as algorithms or conservation of energy or whatever, than some topical thing.
This exists already at Northeastern. They have a data science major and minor with a much more 'practical' intro sequence that teaches in Python. I actually TA'd for it, and many of the students were business or life sciences majors going for a data science minor. It even came with a 1-credit practicum geared towards specific domains, which students could choose from.
I went to UNC Chapel Hill, and this was already done back in 2005 there. CS major intro classes were numbered in the 400s (401, 402, etc) with a focus on data structures, basics of big-O (later refined in algorithms), etc.
CS 101, 102, etc. were the “non-major” intro CS classes and exactly what you describe here. They didn’t count towards a CS major at all. Neither would non-calculus-based physics classes.
Note that, at least at UNC, in every other department I know of, 400-series classes were generally graduate level. But UNC CS operated a bit differently.
I loved the challenge and the knowledge I gained, but it’s worth noting that CS at UNC was much, much harder than nearly any other major there (Chemistry may be the one exception).
Why can't they just take a class on shell scripting? The whole point of computer science is to automate things, because that's what gives you leverage. If you don't care about understanding computer science, at least skip to the point and enjoy the fruits. We've been using the UNIX shell for 50 years. It's not going anywhere.
In the 90's at MIT they solved the problem by having the civil engineering department teach a C coding class to the non-CS engineers.
There was no pretense that it was even remotely appropriate as a CS class.
"Practical python" is undoubtedly useful to a biologist, but I wouldnt understate the utility of an intro to algorithms for technical but non CS majors.
'Algorithmic thinking' more or less doesn't exist in a lot of the classical disciplines with any degree of rigor, so a CS class is the only place a biologist is going to be exposed.
Specifically for utility, there is a very tight mapping between 'how do I search these strings' and 'how do I [most efficiently] design a set of experiments [searching for a a result]'. Both in the literal algorithms as well as the logical framework necessary to extend past trivial examples.
<specialty> for non-majors isn't radical.
"Stats for business"
"PE for physicists"
Why isn't "programming for sciences" not a thing?
When I was at UCLA in the mid-‘90s there were computer science courses taught through the school of engineering, mostly limited to SEAS students. So computer science, computer engineering, ee, me, and the like. I think the intro classes were taught in scheme.
And then for everyone else the Math department of the school of Letters and Science had their PIC (program in computing I think?) series which had two or three courses in C++ and another course in Lisp. As a physics major I took the latter.
> Some time not far in the future, we are going to accept that this is not the same thing at all as computer science and give the computer scientists a curriculum that is a lot heavier on math and theory while adding elective or core courses for non-major students on programming.
I graduated from an Engineering focused college in the late 1990's, and many departments offered exactly these types of courses in addition to the standard intro courses. They were typically named something [domain] [course #] for non-majors.
See also Applied Mathematics vs Pure Mathematics.
The end of an era. This is nothing less than a travesty honestly. The current (now former) curriculum at NEU was uniquely exceptional, and now it will be conformingly adequate. Anyone who complained about the difficulty or lack of "job-market applicability" of the Fundies classes entirely missed the forest for the trees. The point is the design _process_, and using Racket forced this. It also demonstrated the magic that is possible with computer science. The Dr. Racket editor has features that do not exist in any other editor (e.g. visually tracing references, and so much more). The teaching language just got out of the way and let professors teach the essentials of program design, without the burden of language idiosyncrasies. My mind was honestly blown when Olin Shivers coded the Y combinator directly and showed us how to add recursion to a language. It felt like having occult knowledge, and it made me an acolyte to computer science. I mourn the loss of this curriculum for future students, especially considering the premium price tag they now pay.
Taking Shivers' Fundies I class was mind blowing, even as a student that had been programming for several years already. They should have put him and Barzilay (who I had for PL and then later TAed under) in charge of the curriculum update.
I always enjoy seeing Olin Shivers name come up in threads about Northeastern. I had him for Fundies and have many fond memories of his lectures, I was truly inspired. It's no exaggeration to say that class and those lectures helped me find a passion and a career I enjoy. It's a shame they're phasing out Fundies, hopefully whatever they come up with will still be able to have that same impact on young students.
Too bad there isn't an online version that anyone can take.
I'm going to provide a controversial take here as CS grad from a similarly-tiered program: there is a huge chasm between top-4 cs programs and everyone else. The top 4 are obvious: Stanford, MIT, CMU, Berkeley.
Then there are the cs programs of the ivy leagues, not as strong, but usually you have a rich parent or uncle who has already speed-tracked you into a hedge fund, so lets put those aside.
I didnt go to a top-4 cs program and the reality is -- there is no longer a real job market for any cs grad outside the top-4. If it were not for ZIRP it could be there never was! There is definitely not a job market for the sheer masses graduating with cs degrees, and it will take a decade to absorb the fresh graduates.
The curriculum does not matter here, so I think all this discussion is beside the point. No curriculum stasis or change will magically lead to jobs for fresh graduates.
I say this from three perspectives
1. Reality - just ask people if they found a job (ignore nepo-hires, also ignore startup founders with nepo-vc investments)
2. What politicians say. Both Dems and Reps have tacitly (or loudly) noted that local graduates do not cut it. It used to be subtle (https://www.fisherphillips.com/en/news-insights/biden-admini...), but it isnt any longer https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/clyv7gxp02yo
3. How people act. Foreign workers want the jobs more and are willing to do anything and learn anything to get it. My office is 95% non-us workers. They work hard.
At the end of all of this I wonder what will become of such great professors like Felleisen, Hescott and Lerner. A real shame
The University that hosted "The Little Schemer" and all its derivatives. Those books were a delight and taught me to think about programming in a way that other languages had not. (Even if I didn't go to that University). https://prl.khoury.northeastern.edu/teaching.html
I had been to a Scheme conference in Washington, adjunct to the Clojure Conference one year, and it was attended by many undergraduates from Northeastern, (and the authors of those books that I got a photo with.)
I have to feel sympathy for those undergraduates I spoke to. They gave a strong feeling, even then (8 years ago), that it was time for the University to move on in language choice.
I had a similar experience in the late 90s when the world was picking up Java, and our University insisted on teaching in Eiffel.
Teaching object-oriented design as fundamental computer science seems like it would have been an odd decision for 2025. I looked up the class syllabus, and it seems to have been taught in Java (fine) and makes extensive reference to design patterns (not fine).
I once asked a professor about this and the answer I got was interesting.
Basically Java and OO and Design Patterns are taught upfront because it turned out this was a huge stumbling block for a lot of people. Bigger than for instance C and pointers. Like it just doesn't click for a lot of people and they end up struggling a lot the rest of the major
So it's not that these are the most crucial concepts, but you want people to "fail fast" and have a sense if they'll succeed in the major within the first year
There's some irony here. These courses exist because years ago, CS departments made a shift towards "marketability" in their courses at the expense of "fundamentals". So they introduced Java to replace C++ because that's the language companies hiring new grads were looking for. And now OOP and Java are not skills that companies are looking for in new grads. But instead of acknowledging the facts, the departments are lumping Java+OOP in with "fundamentals" and getting rid of it.
I'm sure if we look back further, C++ displaced some other language (pascal?) for exactly the same reason. And likely the same for the language the proceed C++. I'm just not old enough to have personal experience here.
OOP is one of the major schools of programming, significantly more widespread than functional languages. The only thing arguably used more is "simple" procedural, but even that is doubtful. Sure, in the 90s people thought OOP was the be-all-end-all, and we've moved away from that, but it still makes complete sense to teach the main different styles of programming. C and assembly are basically covered by a course on computer architecture and OSs, then teaching an intro course on both FP and OOP gives students a broader understanding on how the vast majority of program design works. Follow up courses on algorithms can then have synergy by showing how much easier/safer/faster they are to implement depending on the style.
What's the problem with design patterns? At its core, a design pattern is just a name applied to a frequently used code pattern. It gives us a common language. I can tell you we are using a publisher-subscriber model and you know what that is without me having to be super specific.
If you are going to teach OO in Java, I fail to see why teaching design patterns is so awful.
Matthias Felleisen, architect (I think) of the current curriculum, explains to a hypothetical skeptical university administrator the virtues of it: https://felleisen.org/matthias/Thoughts/py.html
Here is Felleisen's (who I should note is retiring) views on teaching programming at NEU, which is worth a read:
https://felleisen.org/matthias/Thoughts/Developing_Developer...
(... in the style of his The Little Schemer et al. books)
The new curriculum might be worse but I'm not sure how a 4th year undergraduate should be too sure of themselves when second guessing the department.
My undergraduate degree is from RPI, I have worked with many NU grads, they are often very good, but there have been many eye opening moments for me with them in terms of how different the material they learned was and what was left for graduate school when it comes other the core mathematical fundamentals of computer science. To be fair I've run into engineers from other schools that leave all of this to graduate school too. My first internship I shared a cubicle with a graduate student at Boston University. She was taking a graduate course on algorithm proofs and the course used the same book that we had used in the major weed out class that we had in the spring of Freshman year.
"Program Design" has changed almost as often as popular programming languages during my career. Almost none of those core mathematical fundamentals have changed at all.
Would be interested on hearing more if you expanded on that point about differences in material.
It's funny, my friends and I all entered CS around the same time (2010-2013) and I remember thinking it was weird for NEU to be using Racket. Clearly it's successful, and has proven itself to be a great place to start a CS career.
I always advocated a C based language, like C or C++. That's where my program (not NEU) began and I hated it but am grateful. We eventually moved onto Java. Later courses through my 3rd year allowed me briefly work with functional programming. We never touched Python or web frameworks until our Junior and Senior year projects, and even then it was generally voluntary and depended on the project we had proposed for our databases or algorithms classes.
What I do think CS programs should be evolving for are LLMs. Python + ChatGPT are powerful without the user knowing too much of the logic off-hand. That's a problem for new CS students who need to learn the fundamentals of logic, reasoning and programming. I don't know what languages work "less-better" with modern LLMs, all I know is that ChatGPT and Claude work exceptionally well with Python.
I suppose, as long as we keep paper exams, all hope is not lost. Maybe just a little, in my opinion.
Agreed, LLMs mean that it's MORE useful and important to learn Racket and C, the LLM will help you much more with knowing the specifics of python/js/go/java or whatever human-focused language you end up working with for your job. If you want to be a stellar developer in 2025 you want to learn the things the LLM ISN'T good at, understanding the fundamentals of computer science is way more useful now than it was 5 years ago because the baseline for being good at a language is so much lower with an LLM aiding you.
None of what you talk about is computer science, it's applied programming.
Computer science is to programming in the same way that astronomy is to navigation.
How can a student "understand" LLMs without the background knowledge of computer science?
Programming courses can teach how to use LLMs, in the same way it can teach how to use Python, Java, language-de-jour.
I'm seeing many undergrads write LLM code that they don't even understand. It's a travesty. Can't remember the exact saying, but it went like: "AI creates short development times and super long debugging"
I fourth-year undergraduate argues against the change like a professor. Honestly, this shows the strength of NEU's current (former) curriculum.
Without knowing the new curriculum, I guarantee you that one of the biggest daily complaints about the old curriculum was the requirements that they write unit tests ("check-expects"). Do you think that's going away? Hahahaha. The laugh will be on students who think they're getting something different because the label on the can changed.
If this strategy infects CS degree curriculums widely, employers looking for more than mere coders will overlook CS majors and instead look to engineers, which is where most computing professionals came from academically before about 1980.
Engineering continues to demand that students learn principles grounded in theory (calculus and statistics and discrete math), rigorous analysis (pattern recognition and learning), and system compositionality (design using reliable components as building blocks). CS curricula largely jettisoned this approach after higher-level languages like FORTRAN and C caught on, and has retained only vestiges of old-school mathematical rigor (basic inductive proofs and algorithmic analysis (albeit dumbed down to O(n) only). In the past 20 years, CS has even given up teaching software engineering (compositionality and reliablility) as a requisite skill area. That speaks volumes about the difference that already exists between CS and engineering.
With the enormous growth in college-preparation for software careers in the past decade, it's little wonder that most students prefer a less rigorous, less formal curriculum, and that colleges will choose to meet demand where it lives. Thereafter, if employers want to hires grads with math or engineering skills, they will turn back to engineering as they did long ago. I expect programs in EE and Computer Engineering will adjust their curricula (or add minors) to fill the intellectual void that 'CS For Poets' will leave.
I find myself agreeing. As a person with an engineering background that's part of an ownership team, I often find myself longing for software developers with an engineering mindset i.e think of how the components will fit, without breaking user experience.
My son went to Northeastern ('19) and now designs programming languages and can program skillfully in ANY language. I'm glad he went to Northeastern before this announced change. I feel my money spent at Northeastern was well worth it, not because it made him employable (it did), but because it gave him critical thinking and research skills. It would be sad if too many future Northeastern grads were limited to programming in Python or whatever the mainstream language of the decade is. "Batteries included" Python is great for the workforce but it may weaken basic development skills of undergrads. I'm glad I grew up in an era (1970-80s) when what mattered was sitting down with a manual or book and picking up a language in a weekend and, working with your friends, mastering it in a few weeks or months. A favorite memory that still astonishes me: in 1983 Andy Sudduth, one of my roommates and soon Olympic rowing medalist, built his own computer (a Heathkit), and with a paper due the next day, I offered to lend him my Kaypro-II so he could use WordStar. He said, "Thanks, but I'm going to put my own operating system on it [which he developed in his OS course], then I'm going to use my own full-screen editor I wrote, and then I'm going to write my paper using that editor." "You're going to do all that by tomorrow?", I asked. "Yes." And HE DID IT.
Hey! Guessing by your handle, your son is Alex, yes? He's done some really cool work. I particularly love his paper "Type Systems as Macros" that he wrote with Stephen Chang and Ben Greenman (my advisor now). Super cool stuff.
I attended Northeastern from 2010-2013. Fundies (the freshman-level functional programming courses) was fundamental (ha) to my growth as a software developer. It taught me how to reason about data and how to design programs (the literal name of the textbook).
I know a lot of students hated it—frankly those were mostly the students that it seemed were only doing computer science programs because they’d heard they could make a lot of money in the field. The “real nerds” all seemed to love it, and now nearly 15 years later those are the engineers in my network who have built the most impressive systems and products.
I guess I’ll have to update my default instructions for recruiters from “automatically interview anyone with a degree from Northeastern” to add “if they graduated before 2025”
I can't find a person who didn't initially make the fun-dies joke, then later come around to it, myself included. Sometimes you don't realize someone helped you until years later.
> I know a lot of students hated it
That's a good thing. I don't know whether your assertion about the breakdown between "real nerds" and the other camp is accurate or not, but I think this point stands on its own regardless--learning is hard. It's uncomfortable. It's unpleasant. If it isn't, you're not being pushed hard enough. So what's the point of asking students how they feel about it? Why make strategic decisions based on those data?
I'm genuinely curious, not trolling or anything. It seems completely baffling to me that educators behave this way, and I'd really love to understand why.
Exciting to see this on HN! As a ‘15 NU alum that took the CS program & third time founder, I support the change.
Fundies 1 and 2 were great, but I have always felt that the amount of delayed gratification in NU’s CS program was much too long and incongruent with the university’s focus on experiential learning. I wanted to get my hands dirty and build something and the whole curriculum felt too academic.
Northeastern CS is world class at compilers and programming language research, so I always understood that the undergrad program would tend to be academic as a trickle down effect.
It’s a spectrum with tradeoffs, so I think balance is key. But happy to see the pendulum swing a bit and think it will be good for new grads, especially as more coding work becomes automated.
Mixed feelings here.
There are two separate points. The first one, almost a bit hidden, seems to be a "keep the student numbers up" change: allow placing out with AP CS credit and so skipping the intro courses; making the curriculum easier; reducing the number of students who withdraw from some of the modules; removing the teamwork (code swap) exercise; rolling back on fundamentals and design principles. This is just the word of one TA, but it's big if true.
The second one is about the language change. Look - if you're as great a TA as you say, you can teach design in any language, it just works a bit differently. You can teach good design in python, though it's a lot harder than just teaching python. You can teach design in Java, at some point you'll realise that half the design patterns book is still relevant (the other half has been eaten by streams and lambdas). You can teach design in golang, the people who wrote it at google did think of this. Using a Lisp brackets-style language doesn't give you magical powers, and I doubt the full details of macros and whatever the racket equivalent of call/cc is are that accessible in a beginner course anyway. Even SICP has a JS edition these days.
Personally I think "OOP light" is where it's at: interfaces instead of subclassing, methods that can be called on objects, encapsulation and modularity, and a package-private option so you can unit test stuff but indicate to users that this is not part of the API. Immutable objects and collections are good for many things and need to be taught, but sometimes there's good reasons just to make something with internal state and a fixed set of methods to modify it, so you can reason inductively about its invariants. You can get this out of many languages and teach it properly if you really know what you're doing. And you need actual programming projects, not just exams or "write a 20 line program" midterms. You don't need racket for this.
15 years after MIT made the same switch from Scheme to Python. Since CS at MIT seems to be fine, so will CS at NEU.
"Everything will be OK" - people will succeed in any system. Nobody will ever compare the outputs of the two systems, so nobody will ever know.
Let me instead suggest that one question we should ask is: What kind of students will be successful in the new system? What kinds of students will not?
One interesting thing aspect of the former curriculum is that (IMO) it provides an entry for students who are not entering with a lot of pre-existing knowledge. One of the criticisms of "old school" computer science teaching is that it privileges students who already have exposure to the material... The former curriculum is not the only way to level the playing field, but it certainly does provide a more level playing field for students who might not even be sure about the major.
I will stop with the suggestion that (IMO) pre-existing experience is definitely not the best indicator of future developer quality, so I value a curriculum that does not select for this.
(Caveats: never saw the new curriculum, it could be just fine, there are lots of other ways to accomplish this goal, but still... I am concerned.)
I believe this is a fundamental misjudgement of the CS curriculums at MIT and NEU and, apologies for being blunt, probably the worst take on this thread.
The student populations at MIT and NEU, particularly in CS, are fundamentally different. The majority of undergraduates at CS MIT participate in academic research while the vast majority of CS undergraduates at NEU do not (do not let NEU's exceptionally high computer science research output [1] confuse you - the undergraduate and graduate schools are very separate). MIT educates significantly less students than NEU. MIT's algorithms class (6.046) is significantly more rigorous than NEU's equivalent (CS3000) - just compare the publicly available curriculum and problem sets [2,3]. In general, MIT's CS curriculum caters towards the third of the student body that go on to do PhDs, while NEU's CS curriculum caters towards the vast majority of students that beeline towards industry [4,5]. The institutional goals and educational values between MIT and NEU could not be more different. I know all of this to be true because I've spent a significant amount of time at both institutions.
I don't know if NEU will butcher its CS curriculum. I hope not. I guess we'll just have to see.
P.S. it's worth checking out Pyret [4], essentially a functional teaching programming language. The language is mostly written by NEU staff, so I wager NEU's future CS curriculum plans to phase out Racket in favor of Pyret.
[1] https://csrankings.org/#/fromyear/2014/toyear/2024/index?all... [2] https://courses.csail.mit.edu/6.046/ [3] https://tlarock.github.io/teaching/cs3000/syllabus.html [4] https://facts.mit.edu/alumni/ [5] https://www.northeastern.edu/experiential-learning/co-op/ [6] https://pyret.org
MIT, despite it thinking otherwise, is a slave to industry, funding, and trends.
This adds nothing other than “MIT did it so it’s OK.”
History says otherwise.
Before the current curriculum was implemented, a good portion of students were having difficulty finding jobs and co-ops. After the switch, employers were very eager to hire these students.
The change is not a mere "switch to Python" (which itself is not nothing). It is the replacement of a good curriculum with something mediocre.
Also, I don't know how MIT is doing after the switch.
Is it fine? How would we determine that? What's the metric?
Skimmed it quickly and saw it taught Racket to teach programming design.
I've worked at a coding bootcamp in 2017. And I have to say, I was a bit jealous. Where I was learning through methods at university that were a bit quaint, my students learned JS with the latest frameworks. And sure, you can argue whether the length of 3 months is enough, but they were surely getting a better education. What they learned in 3 months, took me at least 6 months to a year in terms of how useful it is.
The thing is, especially as a beginner, learning any programming language will give you similar difficulties (glossing over some nuances). So why not just learn a practical one?
I think once a student has had a practical programming course under their belt, only after that should more esoteric languages come to showcase certain concepts. I believe that they'd be more motivated to learn them as they're more into the groove of programming.
And this is coming from someone that has programmed 2 years in Pharo.
Are you sure you meant to post in the thread about NEU's intro CS curriculum?
@dang Is this another instance of that concurrency bug in the comments?
What?
Also expressing concerns about the selection of suitable languages for novice programming is King's College CS Prof Michael Kölling, who explains, "One of the drivers is the perceived usefulness of the language in a real-world context. Students (and their parents) often have opinions which language is 'better' to learn. In forming these opinions, the definition of 'better' can often be vague and driven by limited insight. One strong aspect commonly cited is the perceived usefulness of a language in the 'real world.' If a language is widely used in industry, it is more likely to be seen as a useful language to learn." Kölling's recommendation? "We need a new language for teaching novices at secondary school and introductory university level," Kölling concludes. "This language should be designed explicitly for teaching [...] Maintenance and adaptation of this language should be driven by pedagogical considerations, not by industry needs."
While noble in intent, one suspects Kaplan and Kölling may be on a quixotic quest in a money wins world, outgunned by the demands, resources, and influence of tech giants like Amazon — the top employer of Northeastern MSCS program grads — who pushed back against NSF advice to deemphasize Java in high school CS and dropped $15 million to have tech-backed nonprofit Code.org develop and push a new Java-based, powered-by-AWS CS curriculum into high schools with the support of a consortium of politicians, educators, and tech companies. Echoing Northeastern, an Amazon press release argued the new Java-based curriculum "best prepares students for the next step in their education and careers."
Links at: Should First-Year Programming Students Be Taught With Python and Java? https://developers.slashdot.org/story/25/01/05/1853210/shoul...
> The program design skills that our current curriculum emphasizes are “what distinguishes a garage programmer from a serious software developer,” in the words of the Fundies 1 textbook.
I lol:ed.
> The “code swap” at the end of the semester, where students are required to build upon other students’ code, is one of the assignments students struggle most with
Wow, sadism may be common in academia, but that is just on a whole different level! A few hours of waterboarding would be nicer.
There is exactly zero evidence indicating that Racket would be a better introductory language than Python, so why not go with what is popular? CS students are de facto expected to already know basic programming. So with Python you can jump straight to algorithms, you don't have to waste time with a foreign syntax and an esoteric interpreter.
A discussion about this from faculty: https://bsky.app/profile/samth.bsky.social/post/3lf22654bks2...
This is a really frustrating development, and I'm not sure I have the energy to explain why because it should be obvious and because the negative emotions of years of dealing with stuff like this.
My main complaints border around: there's no art in anything anymore in that unless you're doing the lowest common denominator you are doing it wrong, companies show more and more success in influencing others (namely universities) to be their training centers for them, and that universities should be about learning and exploration and not subservience to culture.
I haven't seen many CS curricula start bottom-up with things like digital logic, yet the best programmers I've worked with all started around there and then went upwards --- many of them were self-taught, and although I realise that introduces some selection bias, I have also worked with others who were self-taught but started with some HLL instead, but they didn't have quite the same performance.
That's not "bottom-up". That's a concern for EE/CE or something in that general scope.
As the old Dijkstra quote correctly states, physical computing devices have as much to do with CS as telescopes have with astronomy. They're eating utensils, not the main course. Computer science (the name in English is misleading and horrible) is not about physical computing devices. Devices are merely an instrument. Knowing how to use this instrument well is very useful for people in the field, but it is incidental to the field itself.
Even the distinction between "high-level" and "low-level" languages is meaningless from a CS perspective, as it essentially presumes a target language on a target architecture (with the target "low-level" language) that is treated as normative and "real", but again, that is an implementation concern wrt the instrument. From the CS perspective, compilation is just translation from one language to another.
So I dare say that a CS curriculum that starts with digital logic is not really a CS curriculum, but an electronics engineering curriculum. This is the lesson here.
My university's CS program was taught in Ancient C++. This was fine for the Comp Sci majors, but the intro-level class was required for all science majors. I fielded many pleas for help on homework assignments and saw that many struggled so much with the (let's be honest, incredibly unintuitive) syntax and inscrutable compiler errors, that they couldn't internalize the more fundamental concepts that the course was trying to teach.
Later on, I joined the curriculum committee and argued for it to be taught in Python. The faculty weren't convinced at the time but I see now that eventually they moved the intro course to Python and kept the later courses in C++, which seems like a wise decision. Python is far more approachable and will serve science students well if they ever need to use Pandas etc. (The second-semester C++ course has you implement the STL container types, which is an extremely valuable exercise.)
I read the article and got curious about Pyret. It turns out to be a very nice language, especially for teaching! Very clear and easy to read syntax, no weird bracket mania :D, it even forces programmers to write good formatted code (space surrounding operator!) and encourages the use of best practices (test first!).
I also like the fact that it is functional, invariant by default, and they are working on type checking.
Seeing this, I can't wait to hear about the students' experiences with the new curriculum.
Pyret, the pedagogical language for the next intro course seems like a massive improvement over Racket. I have faith in the PL team at Northeastern, especially BLerner to not skip problem-solving fundamentals in an introductory course. Having been a TA for Fundies I and seeing what these professors value, I feel confident it’s in capable hands and that it may ultimately be an improvement.
i'm a dropout just do horrible coding for fun can anyone explain why CS programs are adamant about not teaching on the job skills? like databases, web, embedded, security plus theory
I am a graduate of Khoury and find this very disappointing. I wasn’t a huge fan of learning Scheme/Racket but after looking back during my career I’m grateful for the education I got there.
This feels like a step backwards.
Northeastern is a major part of PLT right? What does this mean for the future of sch^H^H^Hracket?
I’m wondering if neighboring competitor schools who offer python classes are the reason for the change since more students would actually consider attending a different school due to having a stronger post experience and skills gained.
The best thing for a student is to abandon dogma. The easiest thing for a teacher is to embrace it.
Meh. Don’t agree.
It’s entirely reasonable to ask why students valuable learning budget is being wasted on Racket.
If you go to university you have a reasonable expectation to learn relevant things.
The disease must have jumped the river from M.I.T.
This op-ed was written by an undergrad and complains that Northeastern's switch to Python (from Racket) for its introductory classes will prevent students from learning fundamentals of computer science.
But that complaint can be made about any language! "This dynamically typed language won't allow students to understand type safety." "This high-level language won't allow students to learn pointers and systems programming." Etc.
I believe that an intro course should get students coding since the first major hurdle is learning how to construct any kind of program at all. The switch to a more "employable" language isn't going to make education worse.
>we should not teach something just because it's a useful skill, we should teach our favorite dogma that we believe is totally more useful than a system built up through decades of practical experience, guys really.
At least "Racket" is aptly named.