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Why do so few people major in computer science?

danwang.co

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Re: Why do so few people major in computer science?

#391

Post by erikbye »

PretzelFisch wrote: post #355
Guyag wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think GP hits the nail on the head there with the homework analogy, and you with yours. Just talking to my friends in other careers about the work that I do makes me check time and time again just how many assumptions of knowledge I make when talking about anything vaguely technical (which is possibly a criticism of how I explain things, but also/even if so says lots about this issue). What surprises me is the lack…

My Cousin smart kid had to come over at midnight because he had his first java assignment outside the ide. Couldn't compile because class path was not defined right on windows. Things like that scare people or pop their confidence.

That just sounds like the professor didn't teach them about Java classpath before telling them to use a CLI; or this kid didn't read the course materials.

Re: Why do so few people major in computer science?

#392

Post by erikbye »

jdietrich wrote: post #254
walshemj wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

novice programmers should not be starting a CS degree

Given the gender skew amongst high-school programmers, this is almost equivalent to saying "women should not be starting a CS degree". It also further entrenches the advantages of people who come from affluent backgrounds. Given the success of some short coding bootcamps, it isn't inconceivable that novices could be brought up to speed within the first semester. We don't expect law students to have been amateur lawye…

> We don't expect law students to have been amateur lawyers in high school; it's a bonus if they have been in the debate society or have taken a personal interest in the subject, but it's not necessary. I don't see why CS should be a special case...

Agreed, and when it comes to CS, programming is the easiest part. People who fail to see this are probably the ones who only know programming and no CS.

Re: Why do so few people major in computer science?

#393

Post by [deleted] »

lordnacho wrote: post #107

The grief factor of learning to code is on a different scale to every other major. One missing semicolon will take your whole tower down, and you realise this in the first day of practical exercises. Even if you are of the opinion that CS is math, and coding doesn't come into it, you will hit a coding wall early on. In fact, every exercise in CS has this problem. You add a new thing (eg inheritance), and it breaks. B…

[deleted]

Re: Why do so few people major in computer science?

#394

Post by erikbye »

ransom1538 wrote: post #280
lordnacho wrote: post #107

The grief factor of learning to code is on a different scale to every other major. One missing semicolon will take your whole tower down, and you realise this in the first day of practical exercises. Even if you are of the opinion that CS is math, and coding doesn't come into it, you will hit a coding wall early on. In fact, every exercise in CS has this problem. You add a new thing (eg inheritance), and it breaks. B…

Agreed. I learned this in our new student orientation. "If you can't recompile a linux kernel by the time you graduate, you have learned nothing. Oh, yeah, also, we wont teach you that - it's just something you will run into. " -- Professor Norman S. Matloff

Anyone who talks about compiling the Linux kernel as a measure of difficulty or knowledge obviously knows nothing. I could teach my 9-year-old nephew how to do that.

Re: Why do so few people major in computer science?

#395

Post by lliamander »

jrochkind1 wrote: post #313
Legion wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I would say that this basically screams "badly taught programming". Missing semicolon does not take down work, it just needs to be put back in and ide should help you. The point is that the incidental complexity is there, and that it's something that has to be dealt with, to even begin to get to the fundamental part of the problem. That you have to be using the right IDE (and learn how to use it, and learn to recog…

And yet I had zero problem learning Logo when I was like 10 years old. Neither did _most_ of the other 10-year-olds in the class. They didn't all take to it as much as I did, but the majority of the class was not stopped by the frustration of syntax errors. If you can teach programming to 10-year-olds without it being too frustrating... on the other hand, I suppose you could argue that younger people will have an _ea…

Yeah, I tried to teach myself programming in high-school (mid 2000's) because I wanted to try and get into building games. I was overwhelmed by the complexity of even setting up the tools. I figured I wasn't cut-out for it. Then in college I decided to take an introductory programming class that involved writing simple C programs and I was hooked. The prof did a good job of minimizing the accidental complexities of programming.

Re: Why do so few people major in computer science?

#396

Post by [deleted] »

azakai wrote: post #238
lordnacho wrote: post #107

The grief factor of learning to code is on a different scale to every other major. One missing semicolon will take your whole tower down, and you realise this in the first day of practical exercises. Even if you are of the opinion that CS is math, and coding doesn't come into it, you will hit a coding wall early on. In fact, every exercise in CS has this problem. You add a new thing (eg inheritance), and it breaks. B…

One of my professors actually made the opposite point: that in CS, the compiler will give you an error. You can fix it and move on to the next. While in math (he was a math prof), the paper doesn't object to your writing nonsense. If you have an error early on in your work, all the rest might be nonsense, and you only find out much later after a human grades it. tl;dr at least in CS you get immediate negative feedbac…

[deleted]

Re: Why do so few people major in computer science?

#397

Post by afarrell »

TheSpiceIsLife wrote: post #326
jstimpfle wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing with instructions is always this: The first instant something goes wrong while following them you have to give up if you don't know quite a bit about what you're doing anyway.

I believe I'm not the only one who, when something goes wrong, I become more determined and think "I might learn something here" followed by searching the internet for things related to what went wrong.

Right, but that takes it from "just following instructions" to a thing that requires you to build a mental model of the system you're working with. It also requires you to have confidence that you will find the answer in bounded time.

Re: Why do so few people major in computer science?

#398

Post by anothercomment »

lordnacho wrote: post #107

The grief factor of learning to code is on a different scale to every other major. One missing semicolon will take your whole tower down, and you realise this in the first day of practical exercises. Even if you are of the opinion that CS is math, and coding doesn't come into it, you will hit a coding wall early on. In fact, every exercise in CS has this problem. You add a new thing (eg inheritance), and it breaks. B…

Hm, I wonder if there is a inverse correlation between number of JavaScript frameworks and enrollment numbers :-)

Re: Why do so few people major in computer science?

#399

Post by erikbye »

plafl wrote: post #162
lordnacho wrote: post #107

The grief factor of learning to code is on a different scale to every other major. One missing semicolon will take your whole tower down, and you realise this in the first day of practical exercises. Even if you are of the opinion that CS is math, and coding doesn't come into it, you will hit a coding wall early on. In fact, every exercise in CS has this problem. You add a new thing (eg inheritance), and it breaks. B…

And my own experience is that I learned coding and using Linux on my free time several years before entering college, where I studied engineering, which required no little effort. Programming is hard, I'm not denying it, but so is everything else if you plan to get paid doing it.

> Programming is hard

The programming people do most of is incredibly easy. Stop perpetuating the myth that programming is hard. People have changed careers to programming using week-long courses. No, they're not working on OS design, they don't contribute to the Linux kernel, but they work as programmers.

Don't kid yourself people, most of you work on CRUD shit. For every systems prgorammer there's a thousand front-end monkeys. Most of you work at such a high level it's basically just lego, glueing components together, with your hundreds of .JS files in your project, none of which you wrote. This is what most of you actually do. Complete packages like Rails... a six-week course can change people's lives (not a bad thing).

There is programming that is hard, it's just that that is not the type of programming most people do, and it's becoming more and more rare.

Re: Why do so few people major in computer science?

#400

Post by ma2rten »

lordnacho wrote: post #107

The grief factor of learning to code is on a different scale to every other major. One missing semicolon will take your whole tower down, and you realise this in the first day of practical exercises. Even if you are of the opinion that CS is math, and coding doesn't come into it, you will hit a coding wall early on. In fact, every exercise in CS has this problem. You add a new thing (eg inheritance), and it breaks. B…

There is another problem. Computer Science just doesn't sound that interesting.

Say you could learn to build aircraft engines, understand how the economy works (which has a huge influence on people's lives) or learn how to make a computer print "hello world" on a terminal screen and how to efficiently store data. Most people wouldn't choose the latter. It's actually quite hard to describe what computer science is and why it is a science.

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