The current state of programming instruction in universities is abysmal. The way that universities do it right now, you get some super basic instruction in one,

The current state of programming instruction in universities is abysmal. The way that universities do it right now, you get some super basic instruction in one, maybe two languages, and then are left to fend for yourself for everything else. Either actually teach programming or don't bother at all. With mathematics, a student entering a math degree program is expected to have taken several math courses in high school. Students take placement exams to determine if they need remedial courses, but in general, you'll need to have taken algebra, trigonometry, geometry, and maybe a level of calculus. But for computer science, we don't do any placement testing. Everyone goes into the same Java 101 course. And it's often the same course that everyone else in the college are taking as a gen-ed requirement. Yes yes, insert any Dijkstra quote you want. I've read a lot of his papers. He was a professional troll. We need to stop holding him up as a paragon of computer science instruction. He did some great work in algorithms, but the dude is not the role model we should be pushing. For as much as people like to parrot "computer science is as much about computers as astronomy is about telescopes", at least a telescope is conceptually quite easy to understand. A computer is a vastly more complex beast. Imagine trying to teach mathematics with students who don't even know the basics of the symbolic representation that algebra teaches. Such a student would fundamentally lack the tools necessary to succeed in a math program. But with computer science, we have students who don't know how to use their computers as tools. They only know how to use the software that other people have written and probably not even all that well. Even though "computer science is not about computers", being able to effectively use the tools of the field is still a necessary prerequisite. So either shift the expectation to students having to learn the basics of programming on their own completely, or introduce a course of remedial programming classes in a variety of paradigms. But this purgatory of holding students hands through essentially nothing more than learning how to use the terminal and run a compiler, with only the most basic of procedural programming scattered on top, then throwing them in the deep end, that has to stop.