Northeastern's redesign of the CS curriculum

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”

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.

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.