Northeastern's redesign of the Khoury curriculum abandons the fundamentals of CS

I went to Caltech when they were contemplating similar things in the CS curriculum, although the normal curriculum was less radical than Northeastern's seems to be.

There is a tension here that is being understated which is that people of every major now take the intro-level CS class because programming is integral to everything. Teaching algorithm design in that class is not particularly useful to a biologist who just wants to be able to cobble something together to analyze some data (usually in Python). As a result, the non-computer-scientists and non-software-engineers at the school would rather have a curriculum that is more "practical" and directly applies to research (or later class projects) the students might be doing.

Some time not far in the future, we are going to accept that this is not the same thing at all as computer science and give the computer scientists a curriculum that is a lot heavier on math and theory while adding elective or core courses for non-major students on programming. That will end the compromised state that intro CS courses currently sit in. Right now, there isn't enough teaching talent to run those non-core courses (because that talent is earning the big bucks doing something else).

The end of an era. This is nothing less than a travesty honestly. The current (now former) curriculum at NEU was uniquely exceptional, and now it will be conformingly adequate. Anyone who complained about the difficulty or lack of "job-market applicability" of the Fundies classes entirely missed the forest for the trees. The point is the design _process_, and using Racket forced this. It also demonstrated the magic that is possible with computer science. The Dr. Racket editor has features that do not exist in any other editor (e.g. visually tracing references, and so much more). The teaching language just got out of the way and let professors teach the essentials of program design, without the burden of language idiosyncrasies. My mind was honestly blown when Olin Shivers coded the Y combinator directly and showed us how to add recursion to a language. It felt like having occult knowledge, and it made me an acolyte to computer science. I mourn the loss of this curriculum for future students, especially considering the premium price tag they now pay.

It's funny, my friends and I all entered CS around the same time (2010-2013) and I remember thinking it was weird for NEU to be using Racket. Clearly it's successful, and has proven itself to be a great place to start a CS career.

I always advocated a C based language, like C or C++. That's where my program (not NEU) began and I hated it but am grateful. We eventually moved onto Java. Later courses through my 3rd year allowed me briefly work with functional programming. We never touched Python or web frameworks until our Junior and Senior year projects, and even then it was generally voluntary and depended on the project we had proposed for our databases or algorithms classes.

What I do think CS programs should be evolving for are LLMs. Python + ChatGPT are powerful without the user knowing too much of the logic off-hand. That's a problem for new CS students who need to learn the fundamentals of logic, reasoning and programming. I don't know what languages work "less-better" with modern LLMs, all I know is that ChatGPT and Claude work exceptionally well with Python.

I suppose, as long as we keep paper exams, all hope is not lost. Maybe just a little, in my opinion.

The University that hosted "The Little Schemer" and all its derivatives. Those books were a delight and taught me to think about programming in a way that other languages had not. (Even if I didn't go to that University). https://prl.khoury.northeastern.edu/teaching.html

I had been to a Scheme conference in Washington, adjunct to the Clojure Conference one year, and it was attended by many undergraduates from Northeastern, (and the authors of those books that I got a photo with.)

I have to feel sympathy for those undergraduates I spoke to. They gave a strong feeling, even then (8 years ago), that it was time for the University to move on in language choice.

I had a similar experience in the late 90s when the world was picking up Java, and our University insisted on teaching in Eiffel.

I fourth-year undergraduate argues against the change like a professor. Honestly, this shows the strength of NEU's current (former) curriculum.

Without knowing the new curriculum, I guarantee you that one of the biggest daily complaints about the old curriculum was the requirements that they write unit tests ("check-expects"). Do you think that's going away? Hahahaha. The laugh will be on students who think they're getting something different because the label on the can changed.

Matthias Felleisen, architect (I think) of the current curriculum, explains to a hypothetical skeptical university administrator the virtues of it: https://felleisen.org/matthias/Thoughts/py.html

15 years after MIT made the same switch from Scheme to Python. Since CS at MIT seems to be fine, so will CS at NEU.

I attended Northeastern from 2010-2013. Fundies (the freshman-level functional programming courses) was fundamental (ha) to my growth as a software developer. It taught me how to reason about data and how to design programs (the literal name of the textbook).

I know a lot of students hated it—frankly those were mostly the students that it seemed were only doing computer science programs because they’d heard they could make a lot of money in the field. The “real nerds” all seemed to love it, and now nearly 15 years later those are the engineers in my network who have built the most impressive systems and products.

I guess I’ll have to update my default instructions for recruiters from “automatically interview anyone with a degree from Northeastern” to add “if they graduated before 2025”

Exciting to see this on HN! As a ‘15 NU alum that took the CS program & third time founder, I support the change.

Fundies 1 and 2 were great, but I have always felt that the amount of delayed gratification in NU’s CS program was much too long and incongruent with the university’s focus on experiential learning. I wanted to get my hands dirty and build something and the whole curriculum felt too academic.

Northeastern CS is world class at compilers and programming language research, so I always understood that the undergrad program would tend to be academic as a trickle down effect.

It’s a spectrum with tradeoffs, so I think balance is key. But happy to see the pendulum swing a bit and think it will be good for new grads, especially as more coding work becomes automated.

Also expressing concerns about the selection of suitable languages for novice programming is King's College CS Prof Michael Kölling, who explains, "One of the drivers is the perceived usefulness of the language in a real-world context. Students (and their parents) often have opinions which language is 'better' to learn. In forming these opinions, the definition of 'better' can often be vague and driven by limited insight. One strong aspect commonly cited is the perceived usefulness of a language in the 'real world.' If a language is widely used in industry, it is more likely to be seen as a useful language to learn." Kölling's recommendation? "We need a new language for teaching novices at secondary school and introductory university level," Kölling concludes. "This language should be designed explicitly for teaching [...] Maintenance and adaptation of this language should be driven by pedagogical considerations, not by industry needs."

While noble in intent, one suspects Kaplan and Kölling may be on a quixotic quest in a money wins world, outgunned by the demands, resources, and influence of tech giants like Amazon — the top employer of Northeastern MSCS program grads — who pushed back against NSF advice to deemphasize Java in high school CS and dropped $15 million to have tech-backed nonprofit Code.org develop and push a new Java-based, powered-by-AWS CS curriculum into high schools with the support of a consortium of politicians, educators, and tech companies. Echoing Northeastern, an Amazon press release argued the new Java-based curriculum "best prepares students for the next step in their education and careers."

Links at: Should First-Year Programming Students Be Taught With Python and Java? https://developers.slashdot.org/story/25/01/05/1853210/shoul...

i'm a dropout just do horrible coding for fun can anyone explain why CS programs are adamant about not teaching on the job skills? like databases, web, embedded, security plus theory

This op-ed was written by an undergrad and complains that Northeastern's switch to Python (from Racket) for its introductory classes will prevent students from learning fundamentals of computer science.

But that complaint can be made about any language! "This dynamically typed language won't allow students to understand type safety." "This high-level language won't allow students to learn pointers and systems programming." Etc.

I believe that an intro course should get students coding since the first major hurdle is learning how to construct any kind of program at all. The switch to a more "employable" language isn't going to make education worse.