Bonum Certa Men Certa

The Demise of Computer Science Education

posted by Roy Schestowitz on May 08, 2024

Education is essential for the future; without it, whole nations will perish

Washington Monument soaring above cherry trees

OUR latest video spoke about how a "modern" so-called "CS" syllabus is riding hype waves or running on the buzzwords du jour. Some years ago I looked at the syllabus of "CS" at the university where I had studied. What I learned from it (the latest syllabus) was troubling.

"The colleges here teach JavaScript instead of relevant programming languages," one person told me, "even for 'big data' or 'AI' related degrees..."

"BASIC turned 60 recently," another person said, "and we only just got that cleaned up. The mess from misusing JavaScript as a teaching tool is lasting too long already."

When I studied "CS" here we had no JavaScript at all. I mean, JavaScript existed, but they didn't want to teach JavaScript. Instead they taught assembly, C, and even some Java.

An average "tech" worker nowadays describes himself as "AI" or "cloud" or some other buzzword (or herself - however that's still rare; apparently one needs to lie to get ahead, or add some buzzwords to the CV, especially if the recruiters/HR have no clue about tech, which means working with shallow checklists).

psydruid showed me this course and said that's "the big data course at my university" and "you can basically only do it on GNU/Linux, so they provided a VM for that for those who ran another host OS." Similarly, "the machine learning course was in Python."

So they're basically teaching proprietary stuff (as noted in that last video) instead of the underlying platforms and they focus on buzzwords (or cargo cults) like "big data", with the occasional focus on high-level programming, i.e. inefficient stuff with loads of dependencies and security holes.

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