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This author completely misses the value in the liberal arts, which I'm saying as a computer science major. Definitely my best decision was to study CS as part o

This author completely misses the value in the liberal arts, which I'm saying as a computer science major. Definitely my best decision was to study CS as part of a liberal arts curriculum (where 1/2 of my courses have nothing to do with CS). This is really how it should be done. Sadly, the liberal arts are dying out (or, in the case of the UK, don't exist at the university level). In such a system, I'd actually encourage people to study the arts, not engineering. It's easy enough to simultaneously learn to code and put bread on the table from that. (Most useful technical skills are learned outside the classroom.) Until the non-classroom resources for learning the liberal arts rival those for learning CS, in an either-or situation (like the author's) one should definitely study the arts.

angersock 13y ago
"Until the non-classroom resources for learning the liberal arts rival those for learning CS, in an either-or situation (like the author's) one should definitely study the arts." There are millenia of materials and practice in the liberal arts available for consumption; there is only perhaps half a century of resources for CS. I don't think it's unreasonable to believe that self-schooling liberal arts is possible. One does wonder why the teaching of liberal arts is dying out--there may well be some systemic issue that is causing worse teaching or relevance. The issue may well lie with the current practice of liberal arts.