alt Hacker NewsThis might be just a semantic argument, but if you mean "programming" as in "configuring a machine to implement one or more algorithms" (which I would assert most people do when they use the term), computer science is emphatically not about programming, although programming is taught for much the same reason that artists learn how to use a pencil. Computing, as a discipline, predates the machine (although the machine justified the existence of a whole discipline for studying it because the force multiplier it represented made it worthwhile to dive deeply on the subject of algorithm development and execution, the nature of algorithms, the nature of computability, formal logics, etc... Before the machine, it was just a subset of mathematics).
This was a point repeatedly driven home in my undergraduate curriculum, and in fact, they made a point of having multiple classes where a computer was completely uninvolved.
Yeah, I'm more in this camp too. We did a lot of practical modules, things like OS development, databases and so on. So yeah, learning programming was the first couple months, then programming becomes the tool to express progress in knowledge depth.
It's probably fair to say that although we learned some history, we had the privilege of learning at a time the field was exploding. That history you learned, I lived and worked through that. It's somewhat surreal to realize that my career is your history class.
As mentioned above though, it'll vary a lot from one school to another.