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.
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.