While later on, he does gripe about language quality, I think this is the most salient point of that letter. It touches upon IMO one of the most misunderstood things about Computer Science- it's a science curriculum, not a vocational school. The best (only?) way to build practical skills is doing practical things and learning through experience. Computer Science is more about rigorous reasoning about programs and their mathematical properties.

While learning about practical things like building web apps is fine and well, universities are not well equipped for this sort of vocational curriculum. They are primarily institutions optimized for performing scientific research.

I griped about this to my CS/SE professors until my senior year of college, when I finally understood why they were teaching us all these weird languages and styles instead of the C/C++ that I assumed everybody used at the time: Programming languages come and go - hell, entire platforms come and go - but the underlying concepts (and the ability to teach oneself) are forever. I haven't written a single line of C/C++ professionally, but thank goodness I have the mental tools necessary to pick up all the different programming languages, libraries, protocols, etc. I did end up using.

Hint: Of your graduates, probably 95% will work as software engineers, and only 5% will be computer scientists. But CS departments think they're computer science departments, even though they mostly are located in the college of engineering. (I accidentally typed "enginerring", which I thought was amusing...)

> But CS departments think they're computer science departments, even though they mostly are located in the college of engineering.

I used to think this is true in the form you presented, but now I feel it's really a more relaxed form that's true - CS departments in universities think they're still in universities, not in glorified vocational schools. They try to teach you more than the immediate needs of your likely job, so that you understand the context of what you're working with, and are exposed to more powerful ways of thinking.

(I mean, 99% of the time, your typical JavaScript-slinger doesn't need to know what an "algorithm" is and what can be solved with one. These days, a popular language, StackOverflow and open-source libraries are enough to do acceptable levels of work. However, some extra theoretical knowledge will help tackle more complicated problems, solve them better, and will enable one to do something more challenging if they want to leave the web/CRUDsphere.)

Related: we now have "vocational schools" for programming too. They're called "bootcamps", for some reason.

Tangential: there's a feedback loop between workers, universities and employees in every industry. Progress of the "industry standard" must come from somewhere. If all the new people are being exposed to is Java(Script), the industry will forever keep being stuck on Java(Script). So I feel it's good that at least some people in some universities try to teach above the level required by the industry.

Bootcamps are a joke. Germany has had proper vocational schools for programmers for decades. After high school, you can spend three years to become a Fachinformatiker (it's difficult to translate, but basically means "applied computer specialist"). There are two subflavors, Anwendungsentwicklung (application developer) and Systemintegration (systems integrator, this curriculum combines sysadmin and development tasks).

All that is entirely separate from CS courses at university, which is an alternate path that one can take (and one that has a higher entry barrier since you need to have at least 8 years in secondary education, i.e. until 12th or 13th grade). In the vocational training, you alternate between weeks at school and weeks at your employer where you work on actual projects under supervision of a qualified mentor.

Then there's "vocational" or "applied science" colleges you can enrol in after either vocational or academic secondary school. They offer four-year bachelor-level degree programs in various fields from healthcare to engineering. The education attempts to mix theory and practice (with varying success).

Finally there's the "real" universities, offering primarily five-to-seven-year BSc+MSc programs (before the Bologna Process you used to go straight to master's; these days the steps are somewhat more discrete), and of course PhD programs for those wishing to pursue an even higher level of education.

I would actually take that even one step further - they specifically teach you the things that you're probably not going to encounter in your likely job. I've lost count of how many people I see complain that they never encountered SQL, version control or build management while in school and my response is - that's a good thing! You're going to learn all you need to know about those things when you need them, and they're veryamenable to learning on the job, a little bit at a time. Calculus, statistics, push-down automata, context-free grammars, and all the other "esoteric" stuff you encounter in a CS degree are not.

So, does a software engineer need to know some computer science? Absolutely, but they need to know more than that. They need to know how to efficiently produce working software at scale.

And, to return to my previous post, starting with Haskell could still get you to a software engineering education, as opposed to a computer science education. But it feels to me like the initial direction is aiming at a CS education, not at a software engineering education.

Either one. But certainly not "Java Programming".

Good thing, too -- I doubt many of the UT Austin students Dijkstra was teaching back in the day ended their careers still pounding out punch cards...