Why do so few people major in computer science?
The grief factor of learning to code is on a different scale to every other major. One missing semicolon will take your whole tower down, and you realise this in the first day of practical exercises.<p>Even if you are of the opinion that CS is math, and coding doesn&#x27;t come into it, you will hit a coding wall early on.<p>In fact, every exercise in CS has this problem. You add a new thing (eg inheritance), and it breaks. But not only that, it might be broken because of a banal little syntax problem.<p>And that&#x27;s just what you consider code. If you put in the wrong compiler flags, it breaks. If you can&#x27;t link because something needed rebuilding, it breaks. Want to avoid it? Learn how make works. Huge number of options, which you won&#x27;t understand, because you&#x27;re a novice.<p>Oh and learn git, too. And Linux. Just so you can hand in the homework.<p>Compare this to the rest of university. I&#x27;ll use my own experience.<p>- Engineering subjects tend to revolve around a small number of vignettes. Here&#x27;s an aircraft engine in thermo. Draw some boundaries, apply some equations. If you get it wrong, your tutor can still see if you were going the right way. Once you&#x27;ve learned the relevant points, it&#x27;s not hard doing some rearrangements and plugging in some numbers.<p>- Economics essays are basically bullet points. Miss one out, you still have an essay. Which you can hand in without knowing git.