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I went to Caltech when they were contemplating similar things in the CS curriculum, although the normal curriculum was less radical than Northeastern's seems to

I went to Caltech when they were contemplating similar things in the CS curriculum, although the normal curriculum was less radical than Northeastern's seems to be. There is a tension here that is being understated which is that people of every major now take the intro-level CS class because programming is integral to everything. Teaching algorithm design in that class is not particularly useful to a biologist who just wants to be able to cobble something together to analyze some data (usually in Python). As a result, the non-computer-scientists and non-software-engineers at the school would rather have a curriculum that is more "practical" and directly applies to research (or later class projects) the students might be doing. Some time not far in the future, we are going to accept that this is not the same thing at all as computer science and give the computer scientists a curriculum that is a lot heavier on math and theory while adding elective or core courses for non-major students on programming. That will end the compromised state that intro CS courses currently sit in. Right now, there isn't enough teaching talent to run those non-core courses (because that talent is earning the big bucks doing something else).

unethical_ban 2y ago
<specialty> for non-majors isn't radical. "Stats for business" "PE for physicists" Why isn't "programming for sciences" not a thing?
- sarchertech 2y ago
  It is. When I was in school we had a matlab class for grad students in other departments. I don’t know why you’d try to throw CS majors and Biology majors looking to cobble together scripts into the same class.
- analog31 2y ago
  "PE for physicists." Touche. ;-) Dating myself, my college had Pascal for CS majors, and FORTRAN for physicists. The FORTRAN class was math heavy, and we had a higher level course in process control as well, plus we all took the math class in numerical analysis. When my daughter was in college, it was Java and Python. She took Java. I had suggested to her that she could easily keep up with the CS students, which she did. I very much favor better training in programming for scientists. Taught by a scientist. The "intro to Matlab" that many students take is really too lightweight. Also, as for languages becoming obsolete, the disciplines that I learned in the 1980s are still of value today even if the languages have changed.
- avs733 2y ago
  >PE for physicists You meant juggling and fencing? A more pragmatic answer is who’s going to teach it? Someone with weak skills in the discipline? Or someone with weak skills in computing? (This is a glib answer) Finding people at the true intersection is surprisingly hard, and those people tend to be busy. In grad school I took and advanced statistics course in the psych department. The concepts were new to me but not to the folks in the discipline. However the math (matrix multiplication) and basic coding were easy for me and very hard for them. There was only one person in the department who could teach it, other faculty did that type of work entirely as “clients” which just ran tools and code from others.
  - mywittyname 2y ago
    Who teaches the "<math specialty> for business" courses? IME, it was math professors. It's not unreasonable for the biology department to come up with the common programming use-cases for their students, then have the CS department build a course around those skills. My minor was Bioinformatics. The biology department taught foundational course like biology and genetics and the CS department taught the courses on processing data.
    - avs733 2y ago
      > Who teaches the "<math specialty> for business" courses? IME, it was math professors. IME its the same...I've also found that approach works less well at generating good learning. It (seemingly inherently) results in decontextualized knowledge and does not get students over the application gap, which is the exact problem that such things are trying to solve.
thereisnospork 2y ago
"Practical python" is undoubtedly useful to a biologist, but I wouldnt understate the utility of an intro to algorithms for technical but non CS majors. 'Algorithmic thinking' more or less doesn't exist in a lot of the classical disciplines with any degree of rigor, so a CS class is the only place a biologist is going to be exposed. Specifically for utility, there is a very tight mapping between 'how do I search these strings' and 'how do I [most efficiently] design a set of experiments [searching for a a result]'. Both in the literal algorithms as well as the logical framework necessary to extend past trivial examples.
tiffanyh 2y ago
> There is a tension here that is being understated which is that people of every major now take the intro-level CS class because programming is integral to everything. Why doesn’t the CS department have a different intro class for CS majors and non-CS majors. That’s a common practice in the mathematics, physics, etc. departments. (To have harder intro classes for the students majoring in your department vs those who don’t.)
- klooney 2y ago
  At my university, they did, I don't think it's that uncommon.
  - layer8 2y ago
    Same here. The CS curriculum was theory-heavy (as it should be), and there were purely practical programming courses for the other faculties.
  - SilasX 2y ago
    Right, there’s the longstanding joke about whether you’re taking real geology vs “rocks for jocks”.
- chris_wot 2y ago
  Costs. They don't want to have two courses teaching largely the same concepts when one will do. Short sighted, but that's how they roll.
- seanmcdirmid 2y ago
  At least when I went to school, intro CS was a weed out course for getting into the CS department in the first place, along with calculus based physics that potential engineer and physic majors also had to take. I think these days it’s a bit different in that many schools allow high schoolers to apply directly to the CS department? But then it would be a matter of scale I guess, they usually have clinical professors run these classes because they demand full time attention.
  - 2y ago
shmorkin 2y ago
This exists already at Northeastern. They have a data science major and minor with a much more 'practical' intro sequence that teaches in Python. I actually TA'd for it, and many of the students were business or life sciences majors going for a data science minor. It even came with a 1-credit practicum geared towards specific domains, which students could choose from.
- User23 2y ago
  That uses to be called CIS. When I was at Harvard they still took the algorithms class. Yeah, it was the ezmode version, but it still covered stuff like how to build a hash table and a trie.
- eitally 2y ago
  I live in California and I recently read an article from the perspective of Berkeley's CS department explaining why they don't take transfer credits from high schoolers who took AP CS or AP Stats -- they're just not "real" Computer Science, but rather applied programming. Even when I was an undergrad (1995-1999) and a grad student (2008-2011) everyone knew that CS was a research science [that happened to turn out people who lucratively employable skills], and not a software engineering program, which existed separately at both schools.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
ocschwar 2y ago
In the 90's at MIT they solved the problem by having the civil engineering department teach a C coding class to the non-CS engineers. There was no pretense that it was even remotely appropriate as a CS class.
pseudocomposer 2y ago
I went to UNC Chapel Hill, and this was already done back in 2005 there. CS major intro classes were numbered in the 400s (401, 402, etc) with a focus on data structures, basics of big-O (later refined in algorithms), etc. CS 101, 102, etc. were the “non-major” intro CS classes and exactly what you describe here. They didn’t count towards a CS major at all. Neither would non-calculus-based physics classes. Note that, at least at UNC, in every other department I know of, 400-series classes were generally graduate level. But UNC CS operated a bit differently. I loved the challenge and the knowledge I gained, but it’s worth noting that CS at UNC was much, much harder than nearly any other major there (Chemistry may be the one exception).
mnky9800n 2y ago
This is how physics is now. You teach an intro physics class and you have a billion engineering students all telling you what they actually need to know to be an engineer. But the truth is, it is often impossible to anticipate what a person needs to know for their future. The future is not an easy thing to predict despite recent innovations in AI and machine learning. And a student's current motivation is not necessarily the most important thing to consider when thinking about what they should be currently learning. People often change majors, career paths, etc. This is why I would rather people learn about topics that are fundamental to various fields, such as algorithms or conservation of energy or whatever, than some topical thing.
jart 2y ago
Why can't they just take a class on shell scripting? The whole point of computer science is to automate things, because that's what gives you leverage. If you don't care about understanding computer science, at least skip to the point and enjoy the fruits. We've been using the UNIX shell for 50 years. It's not going anywhere.
- antasvara 2y ago
  I majored in biology. A shell script would be a much more cumbersome tool for making a scatterplot, running a linear regression on a csv, etc. The things that people are using Python for are significantly easier with Python. There are libraries designed to make these tasks super simple, and with the right IDE you wouldn't ever have to touch the shell.
  - jart 2y ago
    I put gnuplot code and python code in my shell scripts all the time. Someone like you should think of it as a jupyter notebook that doesn't need a web browser.
    - antasvara 2y ago
      I'm someone that uses shell scripts in my day to day work (I don't work in biology any more, but did for a while). I'm saying that for the average scientist using these tools, a shell script is not an easier or more useful tool than Python plus libraries. Can you honestly say that shell scripts are more intuitive and easy to understand than Jupyter notebooks? Are they going to be more easy to transfer to other stakeholders? This is one of those solutions that seems better in theory, but likely isn't in practice.
      - jart 2y ago
        I can't think of a faster easier tool for composing and controlling a bunch of heterogeneous things. Even if you write a Python script that does it, you're still using shell to run it. Notebooks are good for experimenting and explaining, not for automating.
HPsquared 2y ago
See also Applied Mathematics vs Pure Mathematics.
fatnoah 2y ago
> Some time not far in the future, we are going to accept that this is not the same thing at all as computer science and give the computer scientists a curriculum that is a lot heavier on math and theory while adding elective or core courses for non-major students on programming. I graduated from an Engineering focused college in the late 1990's, and many departments offered exactly these types of courses in addition to the standard intro courses. They were typically named something [domain] [course #] for non-majors.
scelerat 2y ago
When I was at UCLA in the mid-‘90s there were computer science courses taught through the school of engineering, mostly limited to SEAS students. So computer science, computer engineering, ee, me, and the like. I think the intro classes were taught in scheme. And then for everyone else the Math department of the school of Letters and Science had their PIC (program in computing I think?) series which had two or three courses in C++ and another course in Lisp. As a physics major I took the latter.

unethical_ban 2y ago

<specialty> for non-majors isn't radical. "Stats for business" "PE for physicists" Why isn't "programming for sciences" not a thing?

sarchertech 2y ago
It is. When I was in school we had a matlab class for grad students in other departments. I don’t know why you’d try to throw CS majors and Biology majors looking to cobble together scripts into the same class.
analog31 2y ago
"PE for physicists." Touche. ;-) Dating myself, my college had Pascal for CS majors, and FORTRAN for physicists. The FORTRAN class was math heavy, and we had a higher level course in process control as well, plus we all took the math class in numerical analysis. When my daughter was in college, it was Java and Python. She took Java. I had suggested to her that she could easily keep up with the CS students, which she did. I very much favor better training in programming for scientists. Taught by a scientist. The "intro to Matlab" that many students take is really too lightweight. Also, as for languages becoming obsolete, the disciplines that I learned in the 1980s are still of value today even if the languages have changed.
avs733 2y ago
>PE for physicists You meant juggling and fencing? A more pragmatic answer is who’s going to teach it? Someone with weak skills in the discipline? Or someone with weak skills in computing? (This is a glib answer) Finding people at the true intersection is surprisingly hard, and those people tend to be busy. In grad school I took and advanced statistics course in the psych department. The concepts were new to me but not to the folks in the discipline. However the math (matrix multiplication) and basic coding were easy for me and very hard for them. There was only one person in the department who could teach it, other faculty did that type of work entirely as “clients” which just ran tools and code from others.
- mywittyname 2y ago
  Who teaches the "<math specialty> for business" courses? IME, it was math professors. It's not unreasonable for the biology department to come up with the common programming use-cases for their students, then have the CS department build a course around those skills. My minor was Bioinformatics. The biology department taught foundational course like biology and genetics and the CS department taught the courses on processing data.
  - avs733 2y ago
    > Who teaches the "<math specialty> for business" courses? IME, it was math professors. IME its the same...I've also found that approach works less well at generating good learning. It (seemingly inherently) results in decontextualized knowledge and does not get students over the application gap, which is the exact problem that such things are trying to solve.

thereisnospork 2y ago

"Practical python" is undoubtedly useful to a biologist, but I wouldnt understate the utility of an intro to algorithms for technical but non CS majors. 'Algorithmic thinking' more or less doesn't exist in a lot of the classical disciplines with any degree of rigor, so a CS class is the only place a biologist is going to be exposed. Specifically for utility, there is a very tight mapping between 'how do I search these strings' and 'how do I [most efficiently] design a set of experiments [searching for a a result]'. Both in the literal algorithms as well as the logical framework necessary to extend past trivial examples.

tiffanyh 2y ago

> There is a tension here that is being understated which is that people of every major now take the intro-level CS class because programming is integral to everything. Why doesn’t the CS department have a different intro class for CS majors and non-CS majors. That’s a common practice in the mathematics, physics, etc. departments. (To have harder intro classes for the students majoring in your department vs those who don’t.)

klooney 2y ago
At my university, they did, I don't think it's that uncommon.
- layer8 2y ago
  Same here. The CS curriculum was theory-heavy (as it should be), and there were purely practical programming courses for the other faculties.
- SilasX 2y ago
  Right, there’s the longstanding joke about whether you’re taking real geology vs “rocks for jocks”.
chris_wot 2y ago
Costs. They don't want to have two courses teaching largely the same concepts when one will do. Short sighted, but that's how they roll.
seanmcdirmid 2y ago
At least when I went to school, intro CS was a weed out course for getting into the CS department in the first place, along with calculus based physics that potential engineer and physic majors also had to take. I think these days it’s a bit different in that many schools allow high schoolers to apply directly to the CS department? But then it would be a matter of scale I guess, they usually have clinical professors run these classes because they demand full time attention.
- 2y ago

shmorkin 2y ago

This exists already at Northeastern. They have a data science major and minor with a much more 'practical' intro sequence that teaches in Python. I actually TA'd for it, and many of the students were business or life sciences majors going for a data science minor. It even came with a 1-credit practicum geared towards specific domains, which students could choose from.

User23 2y ago
That uses to be called CIS. When I was at Harvard they still took the algorithms class. Yeah, it was the ezmode version, but it still covered stuff like how to build a hash table and a trie.
eitally 2y ago
I live in California and I recently read an article from the perspective of Berkeley's CS department explaining why they don't take transfer credits from high schoolers who took AP CS or AP Stats -- they're just not "real" Computer Science, but rather applied programming. Even when I was an undergrad (1995-1999) and a grad student (2008-2011) everyone knew that CS was a research science [that happened to turn out people who lucratively employable skills], and not a software engineering program, which existed separately at both schools.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

ocschwar 2y ago

In the 90's at MIT they solved the problem by having the civil engineering department teach a C coding class to the non-CS engineers. There was no pretense that it was even remotely appropriate as a CS class.

pseudocomposer 2y ago

I went to UNC Chapel Hill, and this was already done back in 2005 there. CS major intro classes were numbered in the 400s (401, 402, etc) with a focus on data structures, basics of big-O (later refined in algorithms), etc. CS 101, 102, etc. were the “non-major” intro CS classes and exactly what you describe here. They didn’t count towards a CS major at all. Neither would non-calculus-based physics classes. Note that, at least at UNC, in every other department I know of, 400-series classes were generally graduate level. But UNC CS operated a bit differently. I loved the challenge and the knowledge I gained, but it’s worth noting that CS at UNC was much, much harder than nearly any other major there (Chemistry may be the one exception).

mnky9800n 2y ago

This is how physics is now. You teach an intro physics class and you have a billion engineering students all telling you what they actually need to know to be an engineer. But the truth is, it is often impossible to anticipate what a person needs to know for their future. The future is not an easy thing to predict despite recent innovations in AI and machine learning. And a student's current motivation is not necessarily the most important thing to consider when thinking about what they should be currently learning. People often change majors, career paths, etc. This is why I would rather people learn about topics that are fundamental to various fields, such as algorithms or conservation of energy or whatever, than some topical thing.

jart 2y ago

Why can't they just take a class on shell scripting? The whole point of computer science is to automate things, because that's what gives you leverage. If you don't care about understanding computer science, at least skip to the point and enjoy the fruits. We've been using the UNIX shell for 50 years. It's not going anywhere.

antasvara 2y ago
I majored in biology. A shell script would be a much more cumbersome tool for making a scatterplot, running a linear regression on a csv, etc. The things that people are using Python for are significantly easier with Python. There are libraries designed to make these tasks super simple, and with the right IDE you wouldn't ever have to touch the shell.
- jart 2y ago
  I put gnuplot code and python code in my shell scripts all the time. Someone like you should think of it as a jupyter notebook that doesn't need a web browser.
  - antasvara 2y ago
    I'm someone that uses shell scripts in my day to day work (I don't work in biology any more, but did for a while). I'm saying that for the average scientist using these tools, a shell script is not an easier or more useful tool than Python plus libraries. Can you honestly say that shell scripts are more intuitive and easy to understand than Jupyter notebooks? Are they going to be more easy to transfer to other stakeholders? This is one of those solutions that seems better in theory, but likely isn't in practice.
    - jart 2y ago
      I can't think of a faster easier tool for composing and controlling a bunch of heterogeneous things. Even if you write a Python script that does it, you're still using shell to run it. Notebooks are good for experimenting and explaining, not for automating.

HPsquared 2y ago

See also Applied Mathematics vs Pure Mathematics.

fatnoah 2y ago

> Some time not far in the future, we are going to accept that this is not the same thing at all as computer science and give the computer scientists a curriculum that is a lot heavier on math and theory while adding elective or core courses for non-major students on programming. I graduated from an Engineering focused college in the late 1990's, and many departments offered exactly these types of courses in addition to the standard intro courses. They were typically named something [domain] [course #] for non-majors.

scelerat 2y ago

When I was at UCLA in the mid-‘90s there were computer science courses taught through the school of engineering, mostly limited to SEAS students. So computer science, computer engineering, ee, me, and the like. I think the intro classes were taught in scheme. And then for everyone else the Math department of the school of Letters and Science had their PIC (program in computing I think?) series which had two or three courses in C++ and another course in Lisp. As a physics major I took the latter.