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Northeastern's redesign of the CS curriculum

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Re: Northeastern's redesign of the CS curriculum

#161

Post by nonTop5CSmajor »

kcb wrote: post #159
nonTop5CSmajor wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I respectfully disagree Jtsummers. Firstly, there are not "plenty of jobs for CS grads" -- if there were, you would have supply (us cs grads) matching up with demand (us tech jobs). Yet you see tons of unemployed CS grads. FAANG mostly has hiring freezes, and you have to be part of the inside club to be let in. Many cs grads go into bs jobs way under their potential (random government agencies, contractors.) Walk int…

> Many cs grads go into bs jobs way under their potential (random government agencies, contractors.) Why are those jobs deemed bs?

>>> Many cs grads go into bs jobs way under their potential (random government agencies, contractors.)

> Why are those jobs deemed bs?

Because many of us went into the field bright-eyed, thinking about working on cool products, designing the latest algorithms, or being part of world-renowned teams. NOT to run the nightly batch job for the Massachusetts Depart of Family Services wage garnishment system. NOT to fix bug tickets at the local tax office's COTS implementation, while all the actual software is built elsewhere. NOT to work as a contractor without benefits.

Just look on Linked In, filter by Northeastern CS, see how many people have green semi-circles. Look at where people are landing jobs. Filter out nepo-hires, which are easily visible (e.g., jumping into leadership role straight out of school)

Re: Northeastern's redesign of the CS curriculum

#162

Post by tptacek »

bakuninsbart wrote: post #119
tptacek wrote: post #56

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).

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 c…

I reject the idea that OO is a "major school of programming"; or, if it is, that school has been largely discredited. I think you're on firmer ground if you claim that ideas from OO still inform modern programming (traits and interfaces being a good example).

I think a lot of 2025 developers would be alarmed to think that a project had started from an object-oriented design perspective.

Re: Northeastern's redesign of the CS curriculum

#163

Post by randcraw »

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.

Re: Northeastern's redesign of the CS curriculum

#164

Post by kasey_junk »

tptacek wrote: post #160
kasey_junk wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OO elevated encapsulation, inheritance and polymorphism to fundamental language features. Polymorphism especially has become ubiquitous in modern languages in the same way types have. And perhaps we’ve moved past inheritance hierarchies (though multi/parent inheritance has been interestingly used recently) but even then, knowing about it and its negatives seems as fundamental as understanding goto. Are they on the pr…

I'm comfortable being out on this limb! I think there were OO-skeptics even at the height of OO (call it the Ruby/Java crossover period; or, maybe, the point at which Norvig gave his patterns presentation, 5 years earlier) and I think the skeptical take looks pretty strong in retrospect. Whatever you want to say about the OO inspiration of how Rust and Go are structured, they are both clear and deliberate rejections…

Go absolutely has classes, polymorphism and encapsulation (I don’t know Rust) and many, many packages in go follow extremely common OO patterns.

The 2 differences in go are composition being the mechanism for inheritance and structural typing in an otherwise strongly typed language. Both of those were available in other languages that strongly identify as oo.

My first cs class was taught in scheme. I think that’s the _right_ way to begin to learn. But very quickly after that oo and imperative ought to be introduced.

Re: Northeastern's redesign of the CS curriculum

#165

Post by tptacek »

kasey_junk wrote: post #164
tptacek wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm comfortable being out on this limb! I think there were OO-skeptics even at the height of OO (call it the Ruby/Java crossover period; or, maybe, the point at which Norvig gave his patterns presentation, 5 years earlier) and I think the skeptical take looks pretty strong in retrospect. Whatever you want to say about the OO inspiration of how Rust and Go are structured, they are both clear and deliberate rejections…

Go absolutely has classes, polymorphism and encapsulation (I don’t know Rust) and many, many packages in go follow extremely common OO patterns. The 2 differences in go are composition being the mechanism for inheritance and structural typing in an otherwise strongly typed language. Both of those were available in other languages that strongly identify as oo. My first cs class was taught in scheme. I think that’s the…

I would sum my career up as C -> C++ -> Python/Ruby/Python -> Go -> Go/Rust, and would say my experience of Go (reinforced in Rust) was sharp pushback on class-based OO idioms, especially inheritance.

Re: Northeastern's redesign of the CS curriculum

#166

Post by lurking_swe »

nonTop5CSmajor wrote: post #161
kcb wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Many cs grads go into bs jobs way under their potential (random government agencies, contractors.) Why are those jobs deemed bs?

>>> Many cs grads go into bs jobs way under their potential (random government agencies, contractors.) > Why are those jobs deemed bs? Because many of us went into the field bright-eyed, thinking about working on cool products, designing the latest algorithms, or being part of world-renowned teams. NOT to run the nightly batch job for the Massachusetts Depart of Family Services wage garnishment system. NOT to fix bug…

Sorry - little sympathy here. I acknowledge the market is much worse this year and last year.

But I started at a lame crappy job 10 years ago after college. It’s not a big deal, it gets your foot in the door and then in 2-3 years you can move up to a better company. I did this a couple times and after 10 years i’m now working at a faang adjacent company (household name but not part of faang).

That’s what normal life looks like for a typical CS grad. The fact you think getting a job at faang is expected or normal right out of the gate shows you’re in a bubble. It happens, and i’ve worked with colleagues who did it, but it’s not the norm.

and nobody is changing the world with their code, unless you’re linus torvalds or similar. best to squash that naivety earlier than later lol. It’s a job, and a passion for some (like myself). that’s it. It’s also healthy to find additional hobbies outside of the computer - something i learned the hard way.

Re: Northeastern's redesign of the CS curriculum

#167

Post by norir »

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.

This is how bad ideas keep propagating.

Re: Northeastern's redesign of the CS curriculum

#168

Post by scelerat »

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…

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.

Re: Northeastern's redesign of the CS curriculum

#169

Post by jart »

antasvara wrote: post #139
jart wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I put gnuplot code and python code in my shell scripts all the time.

Someone like you should think of it as a jupyter notebook that doesn't need a web browser.

Re: Northeastern's redesign of the CS curriculum

#170

Post by mixmastamyk »

tptacek wrote: post #162
bakuninsbart wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 c…

I reject the idea that OO is a "major school of programming"; or, if it is, that school has been largely discredited. I think you're on firmer ground if you claim that ideas from OO still inform modern programming (traits and interfaces being a good example). I think a lot of 2025 developers would be alarmed to think that a project had started from an object-oriented design perspective.

It's still useful sometimes. Right now I have a functional-style program I think would be easier to write if was redesigned in Mixin-style OOP. Usually happens the other way, but not always.
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