[julius_geezer]

"In my most humble opinion, the value of CS education is not to prepare young people for a job in IT. Instead, its value is in teaching young people how to think in an abstract and rigorous manner."

How can one disagree with such a goal? Yet surely any education should aim to teach the young how to think rigorously, and abstraction should be one of the tools. What then distinguishes CS education from what the should be doing across the quad in the departments of philosophy/history/literature?

[TriinT]

Philosophy is mostly games of words that lead nowhere. Wittgenstein wrote all about it. History is interesting, but too ambiguous and too subjective. Literature is to be enjoyed, not to be analyzed. CS is rigorous Philosophy and, hence, it's a good mental exercise that one can't get in other fields of knowledge.

When you design an algorithm and implement it in code, the computer will not allow you to be ambiguous and imprecise. You made a wrong assumption? Sorry, your program won't work. No partial credit for you. It's tough, but it's fair.