The academia teaches practical programming. The CS department usually doesn't, as it's not their job.
You can see the same situation with the mathematics department. They teach mathematics, not doing calculations. If another department has a need for more practical mathematical skills (physics is the usual example), they often teach their own classes.
Like many other biases in the academia, this is mostly a matter of self-selection. If you want a career in software, the industry is clearly the better option. If you want a career specifically in CS, there are not that many good alternatives to the academia. Which means that CS departments are populated by people with no particular interest in software.
> Which means that CS departments are populated by people with no particular interest in software.
This is bunk, from my experience at UC Berkeley (PhD) - the professors I knew/worked with loved to program. One explained to me that teaching+research+academic duties left no time for programming on campus, so he spent another 40 hours a week programming at home.
Your experience supports the statement. If the professors you knew had a particular interest in software, they would turn their work focus towards that, not focusing on teaching, research, and other academic duties that are at odds with software.
They prioritize the latter as those are in line with their particular interest. Software is just a sideline, just like I'm sure most of us here have some kind of other interest that we partake in at home.
I see. So anyone flipping burgers at McDonald's must have a passionate interest in and life goal to be flipping burgers. Otherwise, why would they spend so much time on it?
If I understand your argument correctly, you're saying that if someone in practice spends their time doing X and not Y, then they cannot actually be more interested in Y. I believe this flies in the face of human experience.
If you love software, there are a limited number of careers that involve writing software. If you do not have the privilege of a large trust fund, you're looking at industry or academia. Neither tends to involve just sitting in a room and coding all day. (Those situations that do probably won't satisfy a post-teenaged love of software.) Especially if you have a more academic love of software, academia is not a stupid option, even though you realize that your time is going to be filled with a lot of non-programming duties. Yes, you would probably spend more of your time programming if you got a corporate programming job, but loving software does not mean automatically loving any situation where you are typing code into an editor.
This doesn't fit with my experience. Most (90+%) of the developers I've worked with have a CS degree. Those who didn't mostly had math, physics or chemistry degrees. A small minority have no degree at all.
You can see the same situation with the mathematics department. They teach mathematics, not doing calculations. If another department has a need for more practical mathematical skills (physics is the usual example), they often teach their own classes.
Like many other biases in the academia, this is mostly a matter of self-selection. If you want a career in software, the industry is clearly the better option. If you want a career specifically in CS, there are not that many good alternatives to the academia. Which means that CS departments are populated by people with no particular interest in software.