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user-inactivated  ·  3256 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: The science myths that will not die.

I used to think along the same lines about computing and starting at the lowest level, but then I started meeting people coming out of computer science programs who had never designed a CPU, programmed in assembly language, written a compiler or basic operating system or even programmed in C and implemented basic data structures themselves, and it's like everything below the level of what their programming language of choice and its runtime expose is magical to them. Now I think it's better to make students get their hands dirty, even if most of them will never get to do any of that after they graduate.