Re: No programming required
I left Cambridge in 1981, or perhaps 1982 - long time ago. There was no such thing as a "first-year" in Computer Science when I started. Indeed, no such thing as a "second-year" either. I was in the first cohort of the 2-year Part II, and it had obviously been a struggle to stretch "everything we think you need to know about Computer Science" to fill even two years at that point.
There was no explicit assumption you knew something about programming, just an implicit assumption that you had enough interest in a subject you were planning to study that you might have chosen to find out a little about it in advance.
Indeed, Cambridge being Cambridge, there wasn't really any explicit assumption you'd turn up at lectures or that you wouldn't decide to sit the Arch and Anth Tripos instead.
And to be honest, it wasn't a great course. Maurice Wilkes might have been a pioneer of computing, but he hadn't updated his lecture handouts in decades and looked out from his tower (protected by an apparently mousy old lady with the ferocity of Rosa Klebb) over rather too many staff whose most promising work was already long behind them.
If it hadn't been the coincident arrival of the microprocessor which meant that most of my fellow CompSci students were building and programming Acorn System 1s and Nascom 1s in their spare time, I don't think we'd have been able to claim much skill as programmers by the end of the course. Indeed, computer time on the "official" timesharing system was so limited that it was difficult to get even the set coursework done without working overnight or using offline data entry.
And there, I think, is the real point. People will learn stuff if they're interested in it, regardless of the obstacles that might be put in their way. The real question is not why people turning up for CompSci courses can't program, it's why people are turning up for CompSci courses who clearly don't know what it is and aren't interested in it. I think that's got more to do with an education system that tries to put narrow bounds of "need to know" around every subject, discourages any interest that might distract from getting the best results in the school league tables and sucks kids' free time dry.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
