What every computer science major should know (2011)

These kind of lists are always hilariously overstuffed, like a big comfortable rhetorical couch. It's not all that hard to make up a giant list of 8-10 years worth of material, which if anyone took seriously would also lead to a monoculture i.e. we didn't have any time to do anything aside from computer science and this giant-ass list of requirements like "physics up to electromagnetism". I'd say I was close to hitting, for about the year 1997 or so…

There is more harm in the notion that there is anything at all that absolutely everyone needs to know to succeed than there is benefit from the contents of such lists themselves (which boil down to "everyone needs to know what I know"). To succeed, all you really need to know is enough to be able to do meaningful contributions to society in any way whatsoever. This is all there is to it and there are thousands of individual paths…

I would bump up compilers to their own level. Implementing intepreters is cool. But the key value of studying compilers is that it provides you with the tools to build robust, extensible input processing (and, to a slightly lesser extent, data processing and output) code. If programmers are confident with using regular expressions and context-free grammars as appropriate, even if it's just coding up recursive descent parsers, I think they can produce much better input processing in their software. And…

I have never met anyone who knows all this stuff. This is an interesting take on the minimum that someone should know, and I'd argue, an unrealistic one.