Comment by userbinator 6 days ago
I haven't seen many CS curricula start bottom-up with things like digital logic, yet the best programmers I've worked with all started around there and then went upwards --- many of them were self-taught, and although I realise that introduces some selection bias, I have also worked with others who were self-taught but started with some HLL instead, but they didn't have quite the same performance.
What kind of argument is this? Do you also think it's fine for an astronomy course to not teach their students how to use telescopes? Or a creative writing class how to perform the physical act of writing?
If a student knows how to use a computer (a prerequisite to starting software project) they will demonstrably have more opportunities for learning than one who doesn't. And it's not even close.
"He who seeks for methods without having a definite problem in mind seeks in the most part in vain."
> Or a creative writing class how to perform the physical act of writing?
A computer science class teaching how transistors work is more like a creative writing class teaching how pencils are made, and focusing on the quirks a particular language is like the creative writing class teaching a specific style of cursive.
There are degrees which blend the EE and CS worlds, commonly referred to as computer engineering. That would be more along the lines of mixing the hardware/boolean logic idea with then software development. But that's definitely a different perspective compared to what computer science historically meant.
> I haven't seen many CS curricula start bottom-up with things like digital logic
That's how we did it in Slovenia (Uni of Ljubljana). You start with discrete math and bool algebra, and you learn how transistors work in physics, then you learn about digital circuits and write some assembly, after that it kinda feels like two parallel branches. One set of professors teaches you the math of it all, the other set teaches you how all that math works in practice.
It's a really good curriculum.
Yes yes you also have programming classes in parallel with the digital logic and the math and the assembly. Gotta make sure folks can get those all important part-time jobs and feel like they're learning something useful. It's common, or at least was back then, for students to have jobs in industry while they are studying CS. I honestly think having a job and getting to apply what you're learning makes it stick more ... even if it leads to abysmal completion rates (average 7.5 years to graduate when I was there).
That's not "bottom-up". That's a concern for EE/CE or something in that general scope.
As the old Dijkstra quote correctly states, physical computing devices have as much to do with CS as telescopes have with astronomy. They're eating utensils, not the main course. Computer science (the name in English is misleading and horrible) is not about physical computing devices. Devices are merely an instrument. Knowing how to use this instrument well is very useful for people in the field, but it is incidental to the field itself.
Even the distinction between "high-level" and "low-level" languages is meaningless from a CS perspective, as it essentially presumes a target language on a target architecture (with the target "low-level" language) that is treated as normative and "real", but again, that is an implementation concern wrt the instrument. From the CS perspective, compilation is just translation from one language to another.
So I dare say that a CS curriculum that starts with digital logic is not really a CS curriculum, but an electronics engineering curriculum. This is the lesson here.