[bjoernd]

That's a common thing I didn't understand about my fellow CS majors. Many of them did not want to become developers and even took pride in the fact that they made it until the final exams without ever having to hand in a single programming assignment they did themselves.

Yes, these people have amazing careers in management and consulting ahead. Is this good for the industry? I doubt it.

For me, the purpose of a CS course is to make people reasonable at programming with an advanced knowledge about the remainder of the field. It's easier to teach a programmer formal CS methods than to teach a formal methods guy to program.

[jiggy2011]

Funny, I always thought it the other way around. I struggle whenever I try to teach myself any formal/theoretical stuff because without the aid of a teacher checking my work I'm never sure if I really understand or not.

I never had a problem learning programming languages on my own by following examples though.

[lstamour]

I think you'll find that in CS, there's often if not always a way to implement or approximate the theory in code. To me, that's the more interesting part, but it requires self-learning because there are very few teachers who can blend theory into practical terms. Like the original EE intuition examples, perhaps it's something you appreciate after 10 years in the field.