>>11 And I disagree. It's not a prerequisite. The materials you'll find in any CS course are secondary to the materials you'll find in mathematics courses, painting, or even music.

The curriculum is so awful in CS that I really do think it's a waste. There are some interesting challenges in some schools' 400-level courses, but you have to seek them out. They're considered "hard", and people in CS tend to avoid them because they're so unlike anything they've done before.

If this discourages "new programmers", that's too bad. I simply don't know any way to encourage them to learn how to engineer and reason and program without a computer and their favorite language without rejecting the usefulness of their CS education.