Comment by pclmulqdq

> 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.

Why doesn’t the CS department have a different intro class for CS majors and non-CS majors.

That’s a common practice in the mathematics, physics, etc. departments.

(To have harder intro classes for the students majoring in your department vs those who don’t.)

This is how physics is now. You teach an intro physics class and you have a billion engineering students all telling you what they actually need to know to be an engineer. But the truth is, it is often impossible to anticipate what a person needs to know for their future. The future is not an easy thing to predict despite recent innovations in AI and machine learning. And a student's current motivation is not necessarily the most important thing to consider when thinking about what they should be currently learning. People often change majors, career paths, etc. This is why I would rather people learn about topics that are fundamental to various fields, such as algorithms or conservation of energy or whatever, than some topical thing.

This exists already at Northeastern. They have a data science major and minor with a much more 'practical' intro sequence that teaches in Python. I actually TA'd for it, and many of the students were business or life sciences majors going for a data science minor. It even came with a 1-credit practicum geared towards specific domains, which students could choose from.

I went to UNC Chapel Hill, and this was already done back in 2005 there. CS major intro classes were numbered in the 400s (401, 402, etc) with a focus on data structures, basics of big-O (later refined in algorithms), etc.

CS 101, 102, etc. were the “non-major” intro CS classes and exactly what you describe here. They didn’t count towards a CS major at all. Neither would non-calculus-based physics classes.

Note that, at least at UNC, in every other department I know of, 400-series classes were generally graduate level. But UNC CS operated a bit differently.

I loved the challenge and the knowledge I gained, but it’s worth noting that CS at UNC was much, much harder than nearly any other major there (Chemistry may be the one exception).

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.

In the 90's at MIT they solved the problem by having the civil engineering department teach a C coding class to the non-CS engineers.

There was no pretense that it was even remotely appropriate as a CS class.

"Practical python" is undoubtedly useful to a biologist, but I wouldnt understate the utility of an intro to algorithms for technical but non CS majors.

'Algorithmic thinking' more or less doesn't exist in a lot of the classical disciplines with any degree of rigor, so a CS class is the only place a biologist is going to be exposed.

Specifically for utility, there is a very tight mapping between 'how do I search these strings' and 'how do I [most efficiently] design a set of experiments [searching for a a result]'. Both in the literal algorithms as well as the logical framework necessary to extend past trivial examples.

<specialty> for non-majors isn't radical.

"Stats for business"

"PE for physicists"

Why isn't "programming for sciences" not a thing?

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.

> 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.

See also Applied Mathematics vs Pure Mathematics.