[sammoe13]

This spoke to me a lot as someone entering their senior year at a liberal arts school's CS program, especially the lack of CS "fundamentals" stuff. I trust my ability to self-teach and make a decent career out of software, but when the web dev class is pushing JQuery in 2021 it's not weird to be a bit nervous. I'm genuinely nervous for some of our less go-getter graduates. Anyone else from similar backgrounds have schooling and career stories?

[majormajor]

Schools being way behind the curve in terms of languages and frameworks is definitely not new, though I'm not a recent grad.

Some quick googling turned up that an outdated web dev class is in at least one top tier school too: https://gt-student-wiki.org/mediawiki/index.php/CS_2803_DWD the syllabus here includes jQuery and PHP both, neither of which are high on many people's "new 2022 project choices" list - "This topic list is accurate as of Spring 2022's CS 2803 DWD course, taught by Ronnie Howard."

This is not something I'd expect a school of any sort to be great at since it's very fast-moving and it's hard to have really great expertise without working on big projects that you won't necessarily have in an academic context.

EDIT: only leaving in the up to date link, not the ancient reddit discussion

[hamolton]

I went to Georgia Tech 2016-2020. CS 2803, 4803, and 8803 are all codes for special topics courses that haven't been standardized or established, so the class you linked is pretty obscure. The reddit thread you linked is 9 years old. I think the heavy emphasis on OOP in the GaTech CS intro sequence is the most outdated bit, with the worst offender being the "Objects and Design" course with lectures involving a dated and useless picture of enterprise Java design and a group project involving either programming an Android app or a JavaFX app: https://gt-student-wiki.org/mediawiki/index.php/CS_2340

[majormajor]

Whoops, I could've sworn something on there said "May 3", my mistake. Guess it's just the Wiki, not the Reddit thread, that was relevant.

GT circa 2001 had an intro OO course that was "use classes to model airlines and seats for reservations in Java" that was... dated... even for then, sounds like not a ton changed very rapidly. ;)

[mitchdoogle]

Hey jQuery is still used a lot, still developed, still updated. And besides, if you can manage to learn that, you can manage to switch it up to vanilla js if you have to, or pick up other stuff.

[Falkon1313]

You're lucky you even had a web dev course. When I went there wasn't anything related to that. Your choices were C, Visual Basic, and/or Java. And I don't think any of the professors had even heard of source control. This was in the 2000s, after the dot-com boom, so it's not like the internet was something new.

But classes were all focused on academic stuff, nothing pragmatic or realistic. For one of my exercises I asked the professor how to hook in and validate the input, and he said "Oh, we don't cover that. That's higher-level 3rd or 4th year stuff. It's ok if your program just crashes if given invalid data."

I had learned the importance of validating input very early on in teaching myself GW-BASIC and Turbo Pascal several years before college. But in the academic world, that was just considered a trivial detail, not important. You could get a degree without ever even learning to validate input.

Which explains a lot about the state of modern software.

[argonaut]

That's not really a mark against your school's curriculum. Web frameworks are still changing really fast. No university or community college is going to keep up.

I did some web dev give years ago and I already feel pretty out of the loop with the latest popular trends/frameworks in web dev.

I don't really consider it a negative in terms of employability either. The companies that are looking to hire new grads are not going to be testing you on the latest frameworks.

[yowlingcat]

What makes you think that liberal arts colleges structurally lack a rigorous CS program? Did you go to such a program?

If anything, the smaller class sizes, generally affluent student body, and focus on seminar vs lecture make it just as rigorous if not more so in many ways.