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Northeastern's redesign of the CS curriculum

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Re: Northeastern's redesign of the CS curriculum

#131

Post by dagw »

addcommitpush wrote: post #96
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At least when I went to school, intro CS was a weed out course for getting into the CS department in the first place, along with calculus based physics that potential engineer and physic majors also had to take. I think these days it’s a bit different in that many schools allow high schoolers to apply directly to the CS department? But then it would be a matter of scale I guess, they usually have clinical professors…

Are there "math weed out courses"?

My university had a proof based, let's construct the natural numbers from axioms and prove that a+b == b+a type course as the first class for aspiring math majors. It was a "weed out" course, not in the sense that it was particularly hard, but more in the sense of introducing students to this is what 'real' math is actually about, and not so much the stuff you were doing in high school. Some students decided each year that they didn't want to do 'real' math and went on to focus on other things.

Re: Northeastern's redesign of the CS curriculum

#132

Post by nonTop5CSmajor »

mjdiloreto wrote: post #43

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 t…

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.

Re: Northeastern's redesign of the CS curriculum

#133

Post by patrickmay »

awscherb wrote: post #50
mjdiloreto wrote: post #43

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 t…

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.

He also wrote the best Acknowledgments section to a manual ever: https://scsh.net/docu/html/man.html

Re: Northeastern's redesign of the CS curriculum

#135

Post by wbl »

tptacek wrote: post #66
geokon wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Right, so... just don't teach Java and OO at all? They're not fundamental. Some of the ideas in that course are something closer to discredited . Later I edited "a lot of" to "some of"; I was coming on too strong.

If by discredited you mean incorporated into many of the most used languages as well as several of the hot new ones then yes.

Furthermore part of PLT is learning the past and what worked and what didn't.

Re: Northeastern's redesign of the CS curriculum

#136

Post by GeoffKnauth »

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.

Re: Northeastern's redesign of the CS curriculum

#137

Post by fatnoah »

pclmulqdq wrote: post #26

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 ju…

> 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.

Re: Northeastern's redesign of the CS curriculum

#138

Post by nluken »

ben7799 wrote: post #120
treyd wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would be interested on hearing more if you expanded on that point about differences in material.

Types of automata and computability Algorithm proofs around complexity, efficiency, etc.. At least an introduction to the design of languages, parsers, and grammars Algorithms and concepts in the design of different database designs (not how to use specific databases) Fundamentals of operating systems and systems programming Some crossover with computer systems engineering courses. You must know at a basic level how…

I can't speak to your experiences with others from my alma mater but pretty much all of these things are covered in the core CS curriculum at NU (at least the pre-redesigned one). Systems, PL, Algorithms, Algorithmic proofs, automata, ALU design were all part of required courses, and that's before I include the elective CS courses I took.

One area where NU does fall down IMO is that they offer "combined majors" with CS and other subjects that eschew some of these courses to make room for the other half of the major, which will be an unrelated subject. This offering is a mistake because you do miss out on some key concepts. If you're working with a pure CS major, however, they were required to learn all these concepts.

Re: Northeastern's redesign of the CS curriculum

#139

Post by antasvara »

jart wrote: post #128
pclmulqdq wrote: post #26

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 ju…

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.

I majored in biology. A shell script would be a much more cumbersome tool for making a scatterplot, running a linear regression on a csv, etc.

The things that people are using Python for are significantly easier with Python. There are libraries designed to make these tasks super simple, and with the right IDE you wouldn't ever have to touch the shell.

Re: Northeastern's redesign of the CS curriculum

#140

Post by pclmulqdq »

addcommitpush wrote: post #96
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At least when I went to school, intro CS was a weed out course for getting into the CS department in the first place, along with calculus based physics that potential engineer and physic majors also had to take. I think these days it’s a bit different in that many schools allow high schoolers to apply directly to the CS department? But then it would be a matter of scale I guess, they usually have clinical professors…

Are there "math weed out courses"?

Real analysis or other similar "proofs of basic things" classes usually fill this role.
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