[HN Gopher] Northeastern's redesign of the Khoury curriculum aba...
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       Northeastern's redesign of the Khoury curriculum abandons the
       fundamentals of CS
        
       Author : nickmain
       Score  : 11 points
       Date   : 2025-01-10 13:07 UTC (2 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (huntnewsnu.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (huntnewsnu.com)
        
       | jcgrillo wrote:
       | The disease must have jumped the river from M.I.T.
        
       | davewritescode wrote:
       | I am a graduate of Khoury and find this very disappointing. I
       | wasn't a huge fan of learning Scheme/Racket but after looking
       | back during my career I'm grateful for the education I got there.
       | 
       | This feels like a step backwards.
        
       | dickfickling wrote:
       | I attended Northeastern from 2010-2013. Fundies (the freshman-
       | level functional programming courses) was fundamental (ha) to my
       | growth as a software developer. It taught me how to reason about
       | data and how to design programs (the literal name of the
       | textbook).
       | 
       | I know a lot of students hated it--frankly those were mostly the
       | students that it seemed were only doing computer science programs
       | because they'd heard they could make a lot of money in the field.
       | The "real nerds" all seemed to love it, and now nearly 15 years
       | later those are the engineers in my network who have built the
       | most impressive systems and products.
       | 
       | I guess I'll have to update my default instructions for
       | recruiters from "automatically interview anyone with a degree
       | from Northeastern" to add "if they graduated before 2025"
        
       | asimeqi wrote:
       | 15 years after MIT made the same switch from Scheme to Python.
       | Since CS at MIT seems to be fine, so will CS at NEU.
        
       | chrisaycock wrote:
       | This op-ed was written by an undergrad and complains that
       | Northeastern's switch to Python (from Racket) for its
       | introductory classes will prevent students from learning
       | fundamentals of computer science.
       | 
       | But that complaint can be made about any language! "This
       | dynamically typed language won't allow students to understand
       | type safety." "This high-level language won't allow students to
       | learn pointers and systems programming." Etc.
       | 
       | I believe that an intro course should _get students coding_ since
       | the first major hurdle is learning how to construct any kind of
       | program at all. The switch to a more  "employable" language isn't
       | going to make education worse.
        
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       (page generated 2025-01-12 23:00 UTC)