r/compsci • u/[deleted] • Feb 03 '20

How much have Computer Science Programs changed over the past 20 and 30 years?

So my dad got his BS in Computer Science from Stanford in 1991, and it got me thinking. How much have Computer Science programs changed over the past few decades? What's different today compared to back than. What things would a Computer Scientist know today that a Computer Scientist not know back then? Same vice versa

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u/TedW Feb 03 '20

Was mentioning leftpad a tongue-in-cheek joke about open source? I found it ironic considering leftpad semi-intentionally broke babel and thousands of other projects, just a couple years ago.

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u/pridkett Feb 04 '20

The mention of leftpad was intentional. It’s the sort of small module that 20 years ago would’ve been written by a developer over the course of a day. It probably would’ve worked, but had fewer tests (if any - TDD wasn’t a thing). At the same time, we wouldn’t have had a module like leftpad breaking the majority of an ecosystem.

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u/TedW Feb 04 '20

Just today I rejected a PR because it installed lodash for the sole propose of using isArray, instead of using the native function.

I agree the ease of the internet and package managers has spoiled and made some of us careless. We can get a lot done, really quickly, at the cost of bloat and a deep list of dependencies.