[ideashower]

It's funny, my friends and I all entered CS around the same time (2010-2013) and I remember thinking it was weird for NEU to be using Racket. Clearly it's successful, and has proven itself to be a great place to start a CS career.

I always advocated a C based language, like C or C++. That's where my program (not NEU) began and I hated it but am grateful. We eventually moved onto Java. Later courses through my 3rd year allowed me briefly work with functional programming. We never touched Python or web frameworks until our Junior and Senior year projects, and even then it was generally voluntary and depended on the project we had proposed for our databases or algorithms classes.

What I do think CS programs should be evolving for are LLMs. Python + ChatGPT are powerful without the user knowing too much of the logic off-hand. That's a problem for new CS students who need to learn the fundamentals of logic, reasoning and programming. I don't know what languages work "less-better" with modern LLMs, all I know is that ChatGPT and Claude work exceptionally well with Python.

I suppose, as long as we keep paper exams, all hope is not lost. Maybe just a little, in my opinion.

[thot_experiment]

Agreed, LLMs mean that it's MORE useful and important to learn Racket and C, the LLM will help you much more with knowing the specifics of python/js/go/java or whatever human-focused language you end up working with for your job. If you want to be a stellar developer in 2025 you want to learn the things the LLM ISN'T good at, understanding the fundamentals of computer science is way more useful now than it was 5 years ago because the baseline for being good at a language is so much lower with an LLM aiding you.

[rswail]

None of what you talk about is computer science, it's applied programming.

Computer science is to programming in the same way that astronomy is to navigation.

How can a student "understand" LLMs without the background knowledge of computer science?

Programming courses can teach how to use LLMs, in the same way it can teach how to use Python, Java, language-de-jour.

[graemep]

I watched the video first lecture in the MIT course on which Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs is based and it explains "computer science is not a science and is only incidentally to do with computers" and goes on to compare the relationship between CS and programming to that between geometry (which means "earth measurement") and surveying.

[InkCanon]

I'm seeing many undergrads write LLM code that they don't even understand. It's a travesty. Can't remember the exact saying, but it went like: "AI creates short development times and super long debugging"