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Ask HN: What programming languages are used in CS courses these days?

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Re: Ask HN: What programming languages are used in CS courses these days?

#31
post #28

Graduated in 2013, started in 2008. C was used for 101, Systems programming, Operating Systems, and Networks. There was an elective HPC class which taught CUDA C. C++ was another elective class. Java for 102, Algorithms/Data structures, software engineering, and oddly enough Compilers (along with ANTLR for the parser). Programming Languages was Racket or ML depending on the teacher. There were also elective HTML/CSS/…

You went to Cal Poly huh?

Re: Ask HN: What programming languages are used in CS courses these days?

#33
There is a required C++ course and then a required Java course. Later classes use one or the other language, these were the main two languages used in CS.

There was a course on logic gates etc. where we learned MIPS assembly.

The database course used SQL.

A course on algorithms used Python so we learned that as well.

Then we had a course on languages. Half of it was devoted to Common Lisp, but it also touched on languages such as Java and Prolog.

Re: Ask HN: What programming languages are used in CS courses these days?

#34
I graduated in 2011 and my sequence used:

Alice/Java => "101"-type class

C/Perl/Shell => Intro to Systems

C => rest of the systems branch

Java => Data Structures

Standard ML => functional and logic classes.

Many of the more esoteric electives used their own thing. For example, I used Serpent in Computer Music Systems.

The curriculum changed in my final year. The new students now do:

Python => "101"-type classes and basic data structures and algorithms

Standard ML => parallel data structures and algorithms and other functional and logic classes

C0 transitioning to C => Systems courses.

I do think our distributed systems class was experimenting with Go at some point.

Re: Ask HN: What programming languages are used in CS courses these days?

#35
post #3

I graduated in '08 (wow that's 6 years ago already!). We used C++ for all the core courses except Data Structures, which used Java. C++ wasn't too bad as an intro language, with a very encouraging teacher. Java was a disaster because there was way too much boilerplate when you're just trying to write a toy data structure for an assignment. At the time I left, they were considering moving to Python for the intro cours…

OP here, all my C courses had the extra requirement that they compile under GCC on a Solaris box; not for our education but for the prof's benefit of using an automated "turnin" program for grading. Thank god though, I had one cool professor that let me use Visual C++ while everyone else used GCC. The productivity boost allowed me to beat everyone in getting the regular projects done and then give me extra time to co…

Oh yeah, I should mention that we used an old (but still quite usable) version of VS for the C++ courses. That made it easier to code, but the huge and uninformative error messages put a lot of people off.

Re: Ask HN: What programming languages are used in CS courses these days?

#36
'10 from Imperial College London, we did:

Haskell Java Prolog C and C++ NASM assembly

Then depending on the optional modules you chose you might also do a couple of more specialized languages like Matlab.

There was also a mandatory course involving building a multiplayer networked game with total flexibility on language, but predominantly people did browser based games with one of PHP/Python/Perl/Ruby and JavaScript (although NodeJS wasn't around in 2008 when I did the project, but I'm sure people are using it now).

Re: Ask HN: What programming languages are used in CS courses these days?

#37
I'll be a senior in college next year.

We use Python for our introduction course (still 2.x due to a library incompatibility) and Java for the next level course.

After that, it's about 90% Java, with C++ for certain courses. Only exception I can think of is Databases, where we use MySQL and write programs to interface with it in mostly PHP (but also some Java at the end).

Re: Ask HN: What programming languages are used in CS courses these days?

#38

I'll be a senior in college next year. We use Python for our introduction course (still 2.x due to a library incompatibility) and Java for the next level course. After that, it's about 90% Java, with C++ for certain courses. Only exception I can think of is Databases, where we use MySQL and write programs to interface with it in mostly PHP (but also some Java at the end).

hola

Re: Ask HN: What programming languages are used in CS courses these days?

#40
Current undergrad:

Intro: Java

Data structures/algorithms : java

Advanced data structures/algorithms: java

Programming languages: C/scala/javascript

web development: php/js/sql

databases: sql

logic: prolog

networking: C

Comp. Organisation: x86 asm

electives:

Operating systems : no code at all

embedded systems : C

digital systems : VHDL

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