Perhaps, but it's still the closest thing the industry has to a "programming education"; I think it's the first thing employers look for, rightly or wrongly.
> it's kind of silly to judge a whole subject by the first year
How many of my limited days on the planet am I supposed to sink into something before I'm permitted to pass judgement? At some point Stockholm Syndrome would take over.
> A good CS student, who understands the coursework and doesn't cheat, should easily become a good enough programmer just from completing coursework in a mostly theoretical program to get hired basically anywhere. Programming is something you learn incidentally because it's intertwined with what you're doing anyway;
That's not what I saw happening (unless you count the official lectures/colloquia as "cheating"; certainly I saw cases where the meat of the answer to a supervision question was spoon-fed to us directly). The people who could program at the end of first year were the people who could program at the beginning or who "got it" immediately. I never saw people struggling with a new concept but then gradually being taught it (which is something I did see happen a lot in the mathematics course), and a frightening proportion of the students I was friendly with were coming out of that first year knowing seemingly nothing, certainly not being able to program or talk coherently about algorithms or computability. I suppose it's conceivable that those students were somehow getting something out of the system design type courses, but it seems implausible.
I understand there was a shake-up in that CS department a few years after I graduated, so maybe I went through it during a bad time. But the students who graduated there in the meantime aren't going to get a do-over.
> I see it as like if I were hiring for something as generic as "writer". It's easy to have a generic "writer" produce a small sample for you on the spot, similar to a CS interview. Of course you can always practice writing directly itself, but I would imagine someone who had completed a lot of coursework in linguistics, classics, literature, etc. would on average be very well-prepared if they were a good student. But you could still practice and teach yourself on your own if you wanted to
I'd suspect the overwhelmingly important part of writing is actually writing; I only know one person who I'd call a great writer, and hanging out with him the thing you notice is that he writes the way other people check their phone. All the things you list can enhance writing, certainly, but if you don't actually write then any amount of knowledge of linguistics or classical literature is meaningless (at least in terms of how it affects your writing ability).
