The strange nature of computer science education

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The vast majority of students who go through computer science programs are training to be engineers, not academic researchers. And yet…

I just had a masters student say how impressed he was that I was having my OOP students do C++ projects that stretch across more than one file. He said that in his entire undergraduate education, he had never compiled a program that used more than a single file.

It is as though we were training civil engineers to build bridges, but only bridges that stretch across one-foot-wide ditches.

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