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What year did you enter university? I know the number of kids exposed to programming before university now is much higher than it was when I entered in 1996. I

What year did you enter university? I know the number of kids exposed to programming before university now is much higher than it was when I entered in 1996. I think it's safe to assume (but would love to have some real data) that most CS freshmen these days have dabbled with at least one of the mainstream imperative languages before they hit uni.

tfgg 13y ago
It may be turning around now, but applicants for compsci at Cambridge were apparently getting pretty dire by 2006, and this formed a significant part of the motivation for the Raspberry Pi (http://www.raspberrypi.org/about http://www.raspberrypi.org/about) > The idea behind a tiny and cheap computer for kids came in 2006, when Eben Upton, Rob Mullins, Jack Lang and Alan Mycroft, based at the University of Cambridge’s Computer Laboratory, became concerned about the year-on-year decline in the numbers and skills levels of the A Level students applying to read Computer Science. From a situation in the 1990s where most of the kids applying were coming to interview as experienced hobbyist programmers, the landscape in the 2000s was very different; a typical applicant might only have done a little web design. I joined at about that time and found it noticeable that having experience with C++ and a few other languages marked me out as more advanced than many of the other students. Also relevant to this discussion is that in the first term we learnt ML, a functional language. This was partially because of advantages in talking about algorithms in it, but also to put everyone on a level playing field and introduce something that even keener students won't have encountered before. We did Java later, which I found much less rewarding.
- btian 13y ago
  Strangely I found myself struggling to pick up Standard ML despite having experience in C++ compared to my peers with no programming experience. It seems that they just treated it as math, while I had trouble changing my imperative programming mindset. Also Larry Paulson is a legend.
  - agumonkey 13y ago
    In case you're not learning from it, allow me to 'advertise' Coursera's proglang. A third of about sml (after racket and ruby) and it was pure joy, the language core and syntax is very tiny (unlike it's type error messages hehe).
  - tfgg 13y ago
    It's an incredible experience when the bit flips in your brain and you start understanding recursion and top-down design. I don't use ML any more, but it's definitely affected my coding and problem solving style :) Also, I once heard that Larry Paulson stopped going to a certain college's annual computer science dinner because he was hit with a pineapple during a food fight. Bastards.
timje1 13y ago
2005. Because I'd been exposed to HTML and some scripting, I was able to skip on ahead pretty quickly. I estimate that most of my class (about 100 CS students) hadn't had any prior exposure to programming. They dropped like flies for the first few months. However, I went to a pretty poor University (ranked ~60th), I have no doubt that the numbers are very different in the top universities.
gambogi 13y ago
I'm a second year CS major. That's not a safe assumption. Some of them learn to swim, and some of them drown. A guy in my CS1 class last year (there was no placing out) failed to comprehend the concept of words controlling a computer. Further evidence is the four class intro sequence steadily had fewer sections (of the same size) with each passing term
tluyben2 13y ago
I have some younger (sigh ;) friends in the UK attending uni CS now and almost no-one actually ever touched a programming language. Computers, sure but programming no. Same as when I went to uni mid 90s; I remember of the 80 students 3 (including me) had programming backgrounds. Most were there because 'you earn a lot' as a programmer. Don't think that much has changed, at least not in some universities. A lot of these people switched to law or psychology after a few months to 1 year because, well, CS is hard enough if you actually have no problem with the practical assignments; people who never programmed generally experienced a lot of pain and had to put in a lot of effort to do them.

tfgg 13y ago

It may be turning around now, but applicants for compsci at Cambridge were apparently getting pretty dire by 2006, and this formed a significant part of the motivation for the Raspberry Pi (http://www.raspberrypi.org/about http://www.raspberrypi.org/about) > The idea behind a tiny and cheap computer for kids came in 2006, when Eben Upton, Rob Mullins, Jack Lang and Alan Mycroft, based at the University of Cambridge’s Computer Laboratory, became concerned about the year-on-year decline in the numbers and skills levels of the A Level students applying to read Computer Science. From a situation in the 1990s where most of the kids applying were coming to interview as experienced hobbyist programmers, the landscape in the 2000s was very different; a typical applicant might only have done a little web design. I joined at about that time and found it noticeable that having experience with C++ and a few other languages marked me out as more advanced than many of the other students. Also relevant to this discussion is that in the first term we learnt ML, a functional language. This was partially because of advantages in talking about algorithms in it, but also to put everyone on a level playing field and introduce something that even keener students won't have encountered before. We did Java later, which I found much less rewarding.

btian 13y ago
Strangely I found myself struggling to pick up Standard ML despite having experience in C++ compared to my peers with no programming experience. It seems that they just treated it as math, while I had trouble changing my imperative programming mindset. Also Larry Paulson is a legend.
- agumonkey 13y ago
  In case you're not learning from it, allow me to 'advertise' Coursera's proglang. A third of about sml (after racket and ruby) and it was pure joy, the language core and syntax is very tiny (unlike it's type error messages hehe).
- tfgg 13y ago
  It's an incredible experience when the bit flips in your brain and you start understanding recursion and top-down design. I don't use ML any more, but it's definitely affected my coding and problem solving style :) Also, I once heard that Larry Paulson stopped going to a certain college's annual computer science dinner because he was hit with a pineapple during a food fight. Bastards.

timje1 13y ago

2005. Because I'd been exposed to HTML and some scripting, I was able to skip on ahead pretty quickly. I estimate that most of my class (about 100 CS students) hadn't had any prior exposure to programming. They dropped like flies for the first few months. However, I went to a pretty poor University (ranked ~60th), I have no doubt that the numbers are very different in the top universities.

gambogi 13y ago

I'm a second year CS major. That's not a safe assumption. Some of them learn to swim, and some of them drown. A guy in my CS1 class last year (there was no placing out) failed to comprehend the concept of words controlling a computer. Further evidence is the four class intro sequence steadily had fewer sections (of the same size) with each passing term

tluyben2 13y ago

I have some younger (sigh ;) friends in the UK attending uni CS now and almost no-one actually ever touched a programming language. Computers, sure but programming no. Same as when I went to uni mid 90s; I remember of the 80 students 3 (including me) had programming backgrounds. Most were there because 'you earn a lot' as a programmer. Don't think that much has changed, at least not in some universities. A lot of these people switched to law or psychology after a few months to 1 year because, well, CS is hard enough if you actually have no problem with the practical assignments; people who never programmed generally experienced a lot of pain and had to put in a lot of effort to do them.