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Re:Ask HN: How would you evolve modern computer science curr... by bnejad on Wednesday July 02, 2014 @02:08PM (#7978571)
It sounds like all your changes would be more appropriate for a vocational school software engineering program.

For instance your data structures remark. A data structures course would be fairly odd to teach in something like python where you have no pointers or low level control of memory like C or C++. If all you care about is high level structures then that's not really in the spirit of a CS degree data structures course in my opinion.

Re:Ask HN: How would you evolve modern computer science curr... by bayonetz on Wednesday July 02, 2014 @03:06PM (#7978968)
I definitely think the rigor and theoretical basis should still be maintained; definitely NOT saying CS programs should make themselves more vocational though I do see plenty of room for more practical interdisciplinary degrees to spring up.

Not sure about the assertion that Data Structures can only be taught properly in a low level language. Any rigorous course would be pretty much orthogonal to the language's peculiarities. You could implement RED-Black trees in Javascript as easy as any language. The cool thing, for any language you pick, as a side effect you'll get to dive deeper in that language's particular features and idioms while also learning the Data Structures theory. So why not Javascript or Python or Haskell or...? I could imagine some cool projects coming out of this one, like implementing your own efficient Shadow DOMs using the various tree structures that get covered.