[walshemj]

Should if you are going into a CE or CS course not have learnt to code at school before going to university English lit or classics students are expected to be able to read.

I learnt to program when I was 13 and that was in the middle stream at my upper school

[kasey_junk]

This is highly dependent on your opportunity. As hard as it is to find qualified math and english teachers prior to the college level, think how hard it would be to find programming instruction.

That is to say, when I was in school before university there was no choice for studying programming.

There was but it was offered at a private religious school/camp, not via the public schools.

[walshemj]

This was in a comprehensive i.e. a bog standard school and was in the middle i.e. vocational stream - possibly the approach of having specialisation at the middle and upper school works better for feeding children into UNI/Vocational track.

[kasey_junk]

Right, so the bog standard schools you had the opportunity to attend offered something mine (and many others) do not. As someone who is always looking for good developers I certainly don't want to limit the number of people who can learn CS to only those who happened to live somewhere that offered programming at the public school level.

[walshemj]

possibly not fetishizing CS over a more useful general introduction to programming might help.

I haven't had to do any of the big O stuff in anger but I have had to make sure a major telcos billing system reconciled.

[mathattack]

At my Uni the assumption was that you didn't need to know before you started, but the upkick in 2nd year classes was very difficult, and you'd wind up with a few "15+ hours of non-class work per week" simultaneously. So most of the top students had programmed before, but there were a couple very talented outliers who just had an aptitude for it. (Smart plus no bad habits plus work ethic)