[yjftsjthsd-h]

Yeah, I had a friend in college who switched majors after constantly comparing themselves to the rest of the class, when a good chunk of us had been programming since our early teens and they had never written a line of code before their first class. It was a bit sad because they were actually doing fine (IMO), but always felt behind because they were comparing against students with years of head start.

[narwally]

I added cs as a second major in my junior year, and I felt that way at first in the java based 101 course. I had actually been using linux since I was a freshman in highschool (before graphical installers were around), and had picked up emacs to use tex-mode for my philosophy papers. But using Java in Eclipse felt completely foreign to me, and I wasn't sure I was going to like CS because of it.

It wasn't until I got past the first few java heavy intro courses that I realized I had a huge leg up on a lot of the other students that only had experience with Windows or Mac. Before that I felt like I was behind behind the curve because I was stubbornly writing Java in emacs because I couldn't stand how dogshit slow Eclipse was, so I didn't have the advantage of the code-completion or project management features.

Looking back on it, the curriculum was actually just holding most students back even further and by using emacs and managing my projects from the command line, I was just increasing the lead I already had over students that didn't have linux experience.