Given your testimony, I trust you that it's person-specific – especially since my experience at Berkeley, back in the CS60A-CS60C days (with Scheme) was almost diametrically opposite.
My 80s high school had no programming classes to speak of, but in my own tinkering, I'd done a lot of BASIC & Hypercard Hyperscript tinkering, & I'd looked over enough assembly & Pascal to get the gist. I felt, "I'm good at computers, I can learn what I need there on demand, I've got to major in college in other deeper subjects that I can mainly learn from those departments." And, "being a software developer" alone seemd too narrow an ambition - I thought I'd instead be "someone-good-at-software" in some other kind of innovative industry.
Still, I took CS60A because I didn't want whatever watered-down stuff they'd provide to non-majors – Pascal, I think, at the time. Within a week or 2, CS60A convinced me: there's more interesting depth to 'Computer Science' worth learning.
That continued through CS60B, and by the time I'd done CS60C & the combined EE intro theory & lab course – EE1(?) then, I think, unsure its current equivalent – I'd felt like a circle had been closed on my understanding of how it all works, from logic gates (which I'd understood since a 5th-grade science project & then "Rocky's Boots") through to high-level stack-based languages.
I was hooked, & then knew CS would be at least one thing I'd major in. I ultimately double-majored it with Economics.
Then once out in paid employment, I'd work with people with Bachelors or even Masters degrees from schools not quite-as-famous for their Computer Science programs, and those people would be missing basic knowledge & intuitions about algorithms, data-structures, & OSes that'd been well covered way back in the Berkeley CS60A/B/C intro series.
Of course, the depth of tools & experience available to kids through high school age is wildly different, & better, now. And, if your highest goal is professional training as a software developer, college itself (& college-style courses) may not be ideal, compared to just doing as much as you can, as fast as you can, in the most-challenging workplace that'll take you, filling in gaps with self-study as needed.
But if you want a high-quality college-style education in Computer Science, with the breadth & depth for lots of possibility-frontier work – not just the surface stuff evident to a younger or outside view – Berkeley's curriculum was an excellent eye-opener for me. For precocious students, it should probably replace any "Python & C++" coding in AP high school classes.
My 80s high school had no programming classes to speak of, but in my own tinkering, I'd done a lot of BASIC & Hypercard Hyperscript tinkering, & I'd looked over enough assembly & Pascal to get the gist. I felt, "I'm good at computers, I can learn what I need there on demand, I've got to major in college in other deeper subjects that I can mainly learn from those departments." And, "being a software developer" alone seemd too narrow an ambition - I thought I'd instead be "someone-good-at-software" in some other kind of innovative industry.
Still, I took CS60A because I didn't want whatever watered-down stuff they'd provide to non-majors – Pascal, I think, at the time. Within a week or 2, CS60A convinced me: there's more interesting depth to 'Computer Science' worth learning.
That continued through CS60B, and by the time I'd done CS60C & the combined EE intro theory & lab course – EE1(?) then, I think, unsure its current equivalent – I'd felt like a circle had been closed on my understanding of how it all works, from logic gates (which I'd understood since a 5th-grade science project & then "Rocky's Boots") through to high-level stack-based languages.
I was hooked, & then knew CS would be at least one thing I'd major in. I ultimately double-majored it with Economics.
Then once out in paid employment, I'd work with people with Bachelors or even Masters degrees from schools not quite-as-famous for their Computer Science programs, and those people would be missing basic knowledge & intuitions about algorithms, data-structures, & OSes that'd been well covered way back in the Berkeley CS60A/B/C intro series.
Of course, the depth of tools & experience available to kids through high school age is wildly different, & better, now. And, if your highest goal is professional training as a software developer, college itself (& college-style courses) may not be ideal, compared to just doing as much as you can, as fast as you can, in the most-challenging workplace that'll take you, filling in gaps with self-study as needed.
But if you want a high-quality college-style education in Computer Science, with the breadth & depth for lots of possibility-frontier work – not just the surface stuff evident to a younger or outside view – Berkeley's curriculum was an excellent eye-opener for me. For precocious students, it should probably replace any "Python & C++" coding in AP high school classes.