Isn CS primarily about good programming?
The first course in CS usually includes lots of programming, but the majority of the CS curriculum is not about programming per se. Although we teach the Java programming language as part of the intro series, our upper division classes are much less focused on programming. It is understood that once students have mastered their first language, they have the tools to pick up other languages on their own. We offer a class that surveys the range of programming paradigms, including the most well-known procedural languages (like C and Fortran) as well as object-oriented, functional, and logical programming languages. These other languages don’t show up in the New York Times as often as Java, but studying them leads to a profound understanding of programming languages as engineering artifacts and provides insights about the limitations of current technology and the needs for the next generation of languages. Almost all computer scientists learn to program, in part because we often write prog
