Computer science courses that don't exist, but should (2015) • Hacker News Board

Re: Computer science courses that don't exist, but should (2015)

#161

Post by lifestyleguru » Fri, Oct 24, 2025, 9:26 AM UTC

zkmon wrote: post #140

> CSCI 2100: Unlearning Object-Oriented Programming?? People in tech industry, seem to have no idea how the systems in the wild work. Enterprise Java runs the backbone of operations for all of large business organisations such as banks. It is just as grounded as MS Office is. It is object-oriented software that is running the bulk of production environments of the world. Who is going to maintain these systems for the…

> Enterprise Java runs the backbone of operations for all of large business organisations such as banks.

This is rather anti-recommendation. At this point I'm expecting from a bank only to reliably login, preview balance and transaction history, receive and send bank transfers... and they oftentimes fail at this basic feature set. I don't even need credit or interest rates from them.

Re: Computer science courses that don't exist, but should (2015)

#162

Post by aleph_minus_one » Fri, Oct 24, 2025, 9:35 AM UTC

musebox35 wrote: post #87

corysama wrote: post #10

> CSCI 3300: Classical Software Studies Alan Kay, my favorite curmudgeon, spent decades trying to remind us we keep reinventing concepts that were worked out in the late 70s and he’s disappointed we’ve been running in circles ever since. He’s still disappointed because very few programmers are ever introduced to the history of computer science in the way that artists study the history of art or philosophers the histo…

Sadly this naturally happens in any field that ends up expanding due to its success. Suddenly the number of new practitioners outnumbers the number of competent educators. I think it is a fundamental human resources problem with no easy fix. Maybe llms will help with this, but they seem to reinforce the convergence to the mean in many cases as those to be educated is not in a position to ask the deeper questions.

> Sadly this naturally happens in any field that ends up expanding due to its success. Suddenly the number of new practitioners outnumbers the number of competent educators. I think it is a fundamental human resources problem with no easy fix.

In my observation the problem rather is that many of the people who want to "learn" computer science actually just want to get a certification to get a cushy job at some MAGNA company, and then they complain about the "academic ivory tower" stuff that they learned at the university.

So, the big problem is not the lack of competent educators, but practitioners actively sabotaging the teaching of topics that they don't consider to be relevant for the job at a MAGNA company. The same holds for the bigwigs at such companies.

I sometimes even see the conspiracy that if a lot of graduates saw that what their work at these MAGNA involves is from the history of computer science often decades old and has been repeated multiple times over the decades, this might demotivate the employees who are to believe that they work on the "most important, soon to be world changing" thing.

Re: Computer science courses that don't exist, but should (2015)

#163

Post by bux93 » Fri, Oct 24, 2025, 9:37 AM UTC

ninetyninenine wrote: post #103

Unlearning object oriented programming I think OOP became popular because it feels profound when you first grasp it. There is that euphoric moment when all the abstractions suddenly interlock, when inheritance, polymorphism, and encapsulation seem to dance together in perfect logic. It feels like you have entered a secret order of thinkers who understand something hidden. Each design pattern becomes a small enlighten…

The great achievement of OOP is that it inspires such passion.

In essence OOP is just, "hey, if you have a struct and a bunch of operations that operate on that struct, let's put the name of the struct and a dot in front of the names of those operations and you don't need to pass the struct itself as an argument"

It beats me how either the high priests or its detractors get so worked up about it, even with the add-ons like inheritance, poly-morphism or patterns. (Which of course also exist in a more mathematically clean way in functional languages.)

Re: Computer science courses that don't exist, but should (2015)

#164

Post by rini17 » Fri, Oct 24, 2025, 9:41 AM UTC

Manfred wrote: post #128

rini17 wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every attempt at teaching IT history I was subject to, was clouded so much with personal opinions and attitudes that it was anecdotal and preachy. I think assessing piece of hardware/software is much more difficult and time consuming than art. So there are no people with really broad experience.

Your experience with bad teachers seems more like an argument in favor of better education than against it. It's possible to develop better teaching material and methods if there is focus on a subject, even if it's time consuming.

If only one genius in California can do it well, it's as good as impossible.

Re: Computer science courses that don't exist, but should (2015)

#165

Post by rifty » Fri, Oct 24, 2025, 9:45 AM UTC

corysama wrote: post #68

jancsika wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If Alan Kay doesn't respond directly to this comment, what is Hacker News even for ? :) You're not wrong about history, but that only strengthens Kay's case. E.g., our gazillion-times better physical substrate should have led an array of hotshot devs to write web apps that run circles around GraIL[1] by 2025. (Note the modeless GUI interaction.) Well, guess what? Such a thing definitely doesn't exist. And that can on…

https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=alankay Has not been active on Hacker News for several years now. At 85 he has earned the peace of staying away from anything and everything on the internet.

He's actually semi active on Quora!

https://www.quora.com/profile/Alan-Kay-11?share=1

Re: Computer science courses that don't exist, but should (2015)

#166

Post by globular-toast » Fri, Oct 24, 2025, 9:50 AM UTC

znpy wrote: post #142

globular-toast wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Banks as an example of "getting things done" is laughable. Real industry gets things done: manufacturing, construction, healthcare etc. We could do without the massive leech that is the finance sector.

I still get my monthly salary via wire transfers, no issues… banks do get things done.

And that needs skyscrapers and entire financial districts to achieve? This is a tiny fraction of the "work" done by the financial sector. Most of what they do is pointless trading between themselves and sapping the output of the real economy.

The banks' real "product" is trust. You will work an entire month for a "bank transfer" (something you can't even hold, let alone eat or burn) because you believe your landlord will similarly accept a "bank transfer" in exchange for you rent (or, if you have a mortgage, you work an entire month because you believe this means you will be able to continue living in your house unchallenged). This has absolutely nothing to do with what programming languages or paradigms they have in place.

Re: Computer science courses that don't exist, but should (2015)

#167

Post by endymion-light » Fri, Oct 24, 2025, 10:01 AM UTC

ninetyninenine wrote: post #103

Unlearning object oriented programming I think OOP became popular because it feels profound when you first grasp it. There is that euphoric moment when all the abstractions suddenly interlock, when inheritance, polymorphism, and encapsulation seem to dance together in perfect logic. It feels like you have entered a secret order of thinkers who understand something hidden. Each design pattern becomes a small enlighten…

Did you use ChatGPT to write this?

Re: Computer science courses that don't exist, but should (2015)

#168

Post by soruly » Fri, Oct 24, 2025, 10:03 AM UTC

CSCI 3210: Modern text encoding and processing

Learn unicode and utf-8.

Unlearn the 1 char = 1 byte concept

Not only encoding/decoding but searching and sorting is also different. We may also cover font rendering, unicode modifiers and emoji. They are so common and fundamental but very few understand them.

Re: Computer science courses that don't exist, but should (2015)

#169

Post by epolanski » Fri, Oct 24, 2025, 10:17 AM UTC

kragen wrote: post #156

epolanski wrote: post #129

Jm2c but people tend to conflate two overlapping but different fields. CS is the study of computation, SE is the study of building computer programs. Those overlap in the same way physics and chemistry do. Of course the two overlap and chemist's are also exposed to classical and quantum physics and know about Dirac spaces or Born-Oppenheimer equations. But the bulk and core of a chemist curriculum will involve few of…

"Software engineering" is the political ideology that the study of management practices can enable you to deliver a successful software project without learning how to program. It is very popular in fields where a software project can be considered successful without ever delivering usable software, such as cost-plus defense contracting, management consulting, and enterprise software. If you want to know how to build…

> "Software engineering" is the political ideology that the study of management practices can enable you to deliver a successful software project without learning how to program.

Software engineering is not an ideology, but the application of engineering practices to building computer programs, the same way civil engineering is the application of engineering practices to building bridges.

Your statement is odd: software engineering curricula do include theoretical and computational courses, but ultimately those are a limited part and not the focus of the curriculum.

In the same way CS curricula do include few engineering and application-focused exams, but again, they are not the focus.

It's absolutely fine for the two curricula to be different and they are indeed different in most of Europe.

E.g. at the university of Pisa the CS curriculum (obviously speaking about masters, arguing about bachelors is partially irrelevant, you just can't get in enough depth of any topic) has exams like parallel computing, category theory, models of computation, compilers and interpreters.

But the software engineering curriculum has: mobile and physical systems, machine learning, distributed computing, business process modeling, IT risk assessment, IT infrastructures, peer to peer systems, etc.

Of course many exams are shared (albeit they have slightly different focuses) such as: randomized algorithms, competitive programming, advanced programming and you can likely choose one of the other courses as your optionals.

But the focus is ultimately different. One focuses on the theory behind computation, one focuses on the practical aspect.

Re: Computer science courses that don't exist, but should (2015)

#170

Post by bovermyer » Fri, Oct 24, 2025, 10:21 AM UTC

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #21

corysama wrote: post #10

> CSCI 3300: Classical Software Studies Alan Kay, my favorite curmudgeon, spent decades trying to remind us we keep reinventing concepts that were worked out in the late 70s and he’s disappointed we’ve been running in circles ever since. He’s still disappointed because very few programmers are ever introduced to the history of computer science in the way that artists study the history of art or philosophers the histo…

The history of art or philosophy spans millenia. The effective history of computing spans a lifetime or three. There's no sense comparing the two. In the year 2500 it might make sense to be disappointed that people don't compare current computational practices with things done in 2100 or even 1970, but right now, to call what we have "history" does a disservice to the broad meaning of that term. Another issue: art an…

Just because a period of history is short doesn't make it _not history_.

Studying history is not just, or even often, a way to rediscover old ways of doing things.

Learning about the people, places, decisions, discussions, and other related context is of intrinsic value.

Also, what does "material substrate" have to do with history? It sounds here like you're using it literally, in which case you're thinking like an engineer and not like a historian. If you're using it metaphorically, well, art and philosophy are absolutely built on layers of what came before.