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> Inventors of Perl, C, Turbo Pascal, Typescript, Delphi, C#, FORTRAN, PHP, and COBOL pioneer Grace Hopper — no CS degrees. Some of those (certainly Grace Hopp

• tzs 2mo ago
  Add John Backus (FORTRAN) to that group. Like Grace Hopper, got his degrees long before CS degrees existed. His bachelors and masters are in math. Dennis Ritchie (C) got his degree, bachelors in physics and applied mathematics from Harvard, after CS degrees came into existence but 20 years before Harvard offered a bachelors degree in the subject. At the time those interesting computing could study it as a special track in the applied mathematics program. At a lot of research universities I think that was the general pattern. They start a CS research department which takes on graduate students and offers PhD and masters degrees. Then they start offering undergraduate courses, but no degrees. This can go on for a while. Eventually they add undergraduate degrees. When I was a Caltech student (class of '82) they were in the "this can go on for a while" stage. My degree is in math but I took all of the undergraduate CS courses they offered. It wasn't until 2004 that they finally started offering a bachelors degree in CS.