alt Hacker NewsWhat makes you think this would not have been the case in other engineering disciplines?
I'm also a CS guy so I can't directly challenge this on the whole, but my experiences in some classes outside of this in other domains didn't feel like they were 'comfortably' paced at all. Without extensive out-of-class work I'd have been completely lost in no time. In fact one electrical engineering course I took was ironically considered a weed out course, for computer science, as it was required, and was probably the most brutal (and amazing) class I've ever taken in my life.
Personal experience?
I had basically a machine shop course in mechanical engineering in college. OK, it was a bit more than that but I had no "shop" in high school.
Certainly nothing in high school anything that would have really prepared me for a civil engineering or or chemical engineering degree.
I had actually done a little bit of fiddling around with electronics (and maybe should have majored in that). But certainly college would have been a whole different level. (With a whole lot more math which was never my strong suit.)
So, yeah, these days I think there's a different baseline assumption for CS/programming than many other majors.