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Comment by absconditus | Hacker News Reader

So basically you and 90% of your colleagues hate computer science. You want a vocational education in software development, which is something different.

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No, I said SICP was by far my favorite book. I already knew how to program before joining the university.. my goal there was to go deeper than what I already knew.

However, the big majority of my colleagues there didn't want that. They really enjoyed "Design patterns", "C++".. but hated anything potentially more abstract (Like compilers, Algorithm). Note that I'm talking about software engineering.. and not about computer science, which is really different imo (as engineer might have a more practical mind).

Who offers a vocational education at an university level? Not everybody who is smart wants to be an academic.

What does your comment have to do with what I wrote? No one is denying that many people really want a vocational education. No one is claiming that smart people should want to be academics. The point is that what people want is not computer science. Civil engineers do not enroll in physics programs and then complain that their physics professors are not teaching them anything about practical bridge construction.

Then the problem is with college departments and administration who fail to create separate programs distinguishing between CS and SE.

I'd argue that that would be a really bad idea. You can't be a good software engineer without having a good grasp of Computer Science.

There's nothing to stop them from having a lot of overlap. Much like how Computer Engineering overlaps quite a bit with EE.

Community colleges offer an excellent education in the programmer vocation.

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