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CS and programming describe different fields with only some intersection. Think physicist vs. engineer, or biologist vs. physician. You learn any complex subje

CS and programming describe different fields with only some intersection. Think physicist vs. engineer, or biologist vs. physician. You learn any complex subject (CS) or skill (programming) with deliberate study and practice. Good teachers and mentors can help a lot. You seem to express a bias to how schools work, conflating formal education with learning. You can easily start programming today with all of the free open source languages, tools, resources, and people available online.

bruce511 4y ago
Yes, I came here to write the same answer. Learning programming is relatively easy. Pick a language, get a book or three, watch some videos and you're off and running. As with most skills your expertise will improve with doing and stretching yourself, rather than just repeating, will improve more. At one point I read the language reference, slowly digesting one command at a time, building it into an example and so on. Like a human language, your fluency goes up in line with vocabulary - learning the new commands will make you better. The language you pick won't matter overmuch to begin with. It's just a start. Ideally you'll want to spend time with an object language (c#, java), an interpreted language (JavaScript) and, for bonus points, some exposure to a functional language (lisp). [hint - most programmers don't do s functional language, there's a reason for that, so feel free to skip that part]. Computer science is a much harder proposition. Here you need done idea of "cariculum" - ie what to actually study. This part is a lot more science than programming - and there are innumerable branches to follow. Concepts here tend to be language agnostic, and deal with the nature of data, algorithms, hardware and so on. A programmer is asked to "sort this data". A computer scientist would investigate what you mean by "sort" (can you sort text written in say pictographs rather than an alphabet?), what sorting algorithms exist, and what are their constraints, does it work in Order(n), order(log n), order (n^2) time/space etc. In some respect think of the computer scientist as the one who develops the algorithm, and the programmer as the one who implements it.

bruce511 4y ago

Yes, I came here to write the same answer. Learning programming is relatively easy. Pick a language, get a book or three, watch some videos and you're off and running. As with most skills your expertise will improve with doing and stretching yourself, rather than just repeating, will improve more. At one point I read the language reference, slowly digesting one command at a time, building it into an example and so on. Like a human language, your fluency goes up in line with vocabulary - learning the new commands will make you better. The language you pick won't matter overmuch to begin with. It's just a start. Ideally you'll want to spend time with an object language (c#, java), an interpreted language (JavaScript) and, for bonus points, some exposure to a functional language (lisp). [hint - most programmers don't do s functional language, there's a reason for that, so feel free to skip that part]. Computer science is a much harder proposition. Here you need done idea of "cariculum" - ie what to actually study. This part is a lot more science than programming - and there are innumerable branches to follow. Concepts here tend to be language agnostic, and deal with the nature of data, algorithms, hardware and so on. A programmer is asked to "sort this data". A computer scientist would investigate what you mean by "sort" (can you sort text written in say pictographs rather than an alphabet?), what sorting algorithms exist, and what are their constraints, does it work in Order(n), order(log n), order (n^2) time/space etc. In some respect think of the computer scientist as the one who develops the algorithm, and the programmer as the one who implements it.