[ShabbyDoo]

What I don't understand about U of F's decision is that computing is like mathematics in that it's a basic competency necessary for competence in many other disciplines. Shouldn't the graduates of the school's "Design, Construction, and Planning" school know something about programming so that they are not entirely intimidated by the idea of customizing the behavior of AutoCAD? The Education school -- how will it produce graduates capable of teaching high school computer science courses? One can easily come up with other examples.

Perhaps it is sufficient to hire a cadre of instructors to teach basic courses? Such a decision historically has been vilified by faculty unions intent on ensuring that research professors with PhD's are not replaced by "lesser" means of instruction. Never mind that many faculty despise teaching introductory courses where much of the workload is administrative and their specialized knowledge is barely put to use.

What I don't understand is how U of F seemingly thinks it acceptable to imply to the public that it taking steps which eventually will make it incapable of teaching basic computer science to any of its students. Surely, U of F's PR department would be horrified to convey parallel messages regarding its math department. Maybe we are all missing some important facts?

[Xuzz]

While this sounds nice, the truth is that most people do not need — or, in most cases, want — to code, or even to know how their computers work. As time goes on, the levels of abstraction increase, not decrease. And with things like the iPad and Windows 8, we can see that moving ahead for us right now. Computer science is not a "basic competency" — it's an extremely complex,

So I don't think it's weird at all for computer science to be thought of as less important, and certainly less popular. And I also don't think that's a bad thing; while I'd certainly think computers are cool, a computer science degree/programming knowledge is already unnecessary for almost all professions. As time goes on, the need to, say, customize AutoCAD, is only going to decrease: the computer itself will make the task easier.

[mjn]

Among the general public, possibly, but that's also true of mathematics. Among scientists, it looks like it's going the other way to me, approaching math and statistics as something that many people need to know at least a little of. Even over the past decade there's been a significant shift. In the early 2000s, most bioinformatics research was done by biologists in collaboration with computer scientists, with the biologists providing only the biology side of things. Today, it's increasingly common for biologists to be expected to understand and work with the tech side as well. At the very least, if you're a younger researcher working in a data-heavy area (and maybe even if you aren't that young), people expect you to be able to write some Python, interface with SciPy, and navigate matplotlib.

[Xuzz]

I'll agree with that. The scientific data sets are only going to get bigger.

[mcguire]

That's what they've been saying about spreadsheets[1] for my entire adult life.

[1] http://panko.shidler.hawaii.edu/ssr/Mypapers/whatknow.htm