[kd0amg]

May I be slightly selfish, and ask a question to all of you who have a CS degree? Did you learn programming as part of your CS education? Regardless, what's you opinion about the way programming was taught?

By the time I started taking classes, I'd already been programming for fun for a while. I continued self-teaching; it was both necessary and entertaining. In class, I was taught the basics of Java, LOGO, MIPS assembly, C++, Scheme, and Prolog, and course material also used BASIC (which my father had taught me), C, and x86 assembly (which I taught myself). The earliest classes spent a lot of time teaching the language, whereas later classes assumed that students either had prior knowledge of it or would learn it on their own (except for Scheme and Prolog since these were expected to be students' first exposure to functional and logical programming). I think the expectation of some self-teaching is really necessary to ensure that students learn to do so before they graduate. Putting together simple building blocks given on lecture slides only takes one so far; eventually, you'll have to do something you didn't learn to do in class.