alt Hacker Newsyes, I couldn't agree more, if like to add that "the industry" drove programming and maths apart:
computer science, or "Informatik/informatique" how some Europeans call it, was a branch of mathematics, and "the industry" pushed _very_ hard to get it "practical", make colleges and universities produce programmers, not computer scientists.
so they removed all "challenging" maths requirements from the curriculum, and you can graduate with much less formal rigour, and certainly without being a matematician.
that's also how python replaced scheme as a first teaching language.
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> that's also how python replaced scheme as a first teaching language.
Not so fast. There were plenty more horses in that race.
You can easily make an argument that Python is a 'worse' language than Scheme as a first teaching language (though not necessarily one I would subscribe to: they are both dynamically typed and mostly differ in syntax). But Python (and Scheme and even Basic) are a lot better than starting people off with C or Java, or, God forbid, C++.
Obviously there are people who you can lock in a dimly lit closet with just an outdated reference manual to a made up machine and they'll can't help but pick up programming; and those won't have much trouble coping with Java or C++. But those who actually need to be taught will be better off with Python (and Scheme).
This is a good thing, it was just implemented the wrong way. Should have split the degree into separate engineering and theoretical tracks with different names (CS and CE/SE). Today we get weird hybrids where the same degree is math focused in one school and more practical in another.
There is space for both but in the real world we need more engineers who know how to build systems properly than theorists who are great at formal reasoning. It's like structural engineering and physics.