Been toying around with a little bit of F# lately. It's giving me memories of programming in Standard ML at the start of my CS degree, many years ago! They were really onto something starting everyone off with functional programming - years before it was cool
It kind of comes back to what the course was really about. If all they'd taught was the subset of topics relevant to the average software engineering job in the late 90s, it wouldn't have aged well - or been particularly flexible. I might have been able to self-teach C programming in 1996. Basics of chip design? Language parsing? Nah, not so much.
Now, I didn't go into hardware design, or compiler writing - but some of my classmates absolutely did. The degree provided the breadth and depth for people to go into the many sub-fields of computing, or go on to even deeper study. I think that kind of thing is totally forgotten when people now deride CS degrees as being "unnecessary"/"irrelevant", etc.
Not everything is a web app with a React frontend, a Node backend, and a simple data schema. Even now, not everyone uses Git. These things are important, and prevalent, but *not* universal.
For those who want a job in software, there are routes now that don't require a degree, and that's great - more access for those with the ability makes it better all round (so long as employers are willing to provide ongoing training). What I'll never be here for, though, is the disturbing modern trend for running down the value of Computer Science degrees.
@airadam yeah I never directly need to interact with the hardware architecture, but I absolutely consider it for problem solving and optimization, even if only in an abstract way.
@airadam ooh, I did some SML too. If F# is similar I should check it out. Thanks for the pointer.
@mauvedeity pleasure! Definitely feels like there was a lot of inspiration. My next mini-task, just for future reference, is to see if I can create a toy project where I can call F# code from C#!
@mauvedeity Had a go and got it working! Only a tiny example, but at least I now know it's possible if it looks like combining the two would be helpful.