If you’ve discussed CS education or gotten a CS education, you’ve probably encountered this line. It’s often given as a retort for why a CS program is not centered on teaching programming. As a pure factual statement, it is absolutely correct: CS is not programming. Even as an overarching statement about CS programs, it is indeed correct: CS is not programming and therefore CS degrees should cover material that is not programming.

However, there is a particular interpretation of this phrase that I find troubling, namely that CS is not programming and therefore we should not expect CS programs to properly teach people how to code, and we should not expect CS professors to know how to code.

Let me be clear here: I am not saying that every CS professor should know how to code. I am not saying that every course should involve programming. I am saying that there should be a significant portion of CS professors who know how to code because there should be a significant portion of classes that involve programming.

Perhaps this is a little bit of a straw man here, and perhaps this will not line up with other people’s experiences, but I’ve found that CS professors get really defensive when you suggest that they could maybe stand to teach a little more programming.

Let’s start with a basic statement: You should have professors who really know how to code teach courses like Data Structures, Operating Systems, and Intro to CS. They should be comfortable using a computer and writing vaguely idiomatic code that actually works. They should be reasonably up to date on technology, so no C++ 98. None of this is that controversial.

But what’s the natural corollary? You should hire professors who know how to code! Not all of them, but there needs to be a reasonable pool of faculty who can teach programming. This is where the push-back occurs. Suddenly scores of professors pop up preaching the titular phrase: CS Is Not Programming!

I do see their point. CS is far more than programming and often involves more knowledge of mathematics, statistics, or even physics than programming ability. And it’s understandably frustrating for someone who is a world-reknowned expert in a field, who spends likely hours upon hours literally pushing the limits of human knowledge, to be forced to also keep up with programming practice.

It’s also a tricky request from a university politics standpoint. By demanding for professors who are able to teach programming, you are effectively asking the department to make programming ability required to be hired. Departments don’t like being told what to do, and they especially don’t like being told to do stuff that goes against their existing practice.

But nonetheless, we need professors who can code, so they can teach students how to code. In some extreme cases, perhaps those who have read Dijkstra’s On the Cruelty of Really Teaching Computer Science and took it a little too seriously, this is a controversial statement. I would disagree. In my view, programming is a sufficiently important subset of computer science that it is worth teaching. It is also a subset that happens to be of key importance to almost every computer science major. Whether it’s writing compilers, building miniature distributed systems, or implementing some algorithms, programming is both an essential part of computer science, and an excellent means towards learning the rest of CS. I don’t know about everybody else, but I see programming as a way to make learning really fun. I wish professors saw it similarly.

One solution might be to split up computer science and software engineering. Some universities already do this. I have mixed feelings about this approach. On one hand, it does have a precedence in the split between physics and engineering. Perhaps both fields, with their separation, would be able to flourish. Indeed I have felt that there is too much content to teach a fully satisfactory CS curriculum and a fully satisfactory programming curriculum. I’ve also written about what I’d envision as an ideal degree for software engineering. I’d love to see a software engineering department filled with experienced programmers passing on their wisdom. Likewise computer science could become a truly incredible course of study with deep courses in type theory, distributed systems, machine learning, complexity theory, and so on.

On the other hand, I worry that software engineering majors would not get the full breadth of a proper computer science education. Really, that’s the sentiment of the phrase “CS is not programming”: To become a good programmer, you need to know computer science, and that computer science is very often not programming. Perhaps by forcing students to learn computer science, we are leaving them better off. However, that may be a false dichotomy. We can teach computer science through programming exercises.

Another danger is that by splitting up the two departments, all of the students will flock to software engineering, leaving CS departments to be forgotten and neglected. I doubt this would actually happen. First, plenty of students would continue to get CS degrees out of some misplaced notion that it is harder and therefore more prestigious. Second, computer science is still absolutely, fantastically useful. If you want to do any major foundational work in software engineering, you must know your computer science. And third, computer science professors are still a hot commodity for their research developments. I don’t anticipate computer science being a neglected field anytime soon.

Some may wonder why we must do anything at all. CS departments have existed for quite a few years now and worked just fine. Which is…somewhat true. They’ve worked in that they’ve managed, for the most part, to teach students computer science, and those students, for the most part, have managed to take that computer science and turn it into programming skills. However, if you pay attention, you’ll notice that the students are effectively self-teaching their own programming degree. Which means that the students who succeed in becoming developers are those who are comfortable learning on their own. I don’t object to that—as I’ve previously stated, self teaching is an essential skill for a programmer—but I do think students could use a little more help in the beginning. Often times what determines if a student will make it over that initial hump are nebulous stuff like whether they feel welcome as a programmer, whether they have received validation for their efforts, whether they have friends who are also interested in programming, and so on. By explicitly teaching programming, we can ensure that these factors matter less.

Not to mention, many CS programs are experiencing record enrollment and therefore ridiculous waitlists. By splitting into two programs, that could perhaps result in more professors and therefore more classes.

And finally, it’s a commonly cited statement that us software developers are not very good at programming. After all, if bridges collapsed as frequently as AWS had outages, we’d be putting our civil engineers on trial. Perhaps this is because the core way to learn programming is by self-teaching while learning a similar but different subject taught by people who have little to no experience writing software professionally. And, at least for me, the most commonly cited examples for software design in my classes were, *checks notes*, the Linux kernel¹? Yeah…that’s not great.

If we want to build better, safer, faster software, then we should teach our students how to program instead of expecting them to teach themselves.