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MIT Hacker Tools: a lecture series on programmer tools

hacker-tools.github.io

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Re: MIT Hacker Tools: a lecture series on programmer tools

#31

Post by devonkim »

gumby wrote: post #4
Jonhoo wrote: post #2

Hi all! We (@anishathalye, @jjgo, and @jonhoo) have long felt that while university CS classes are great at teaching specific topics, they often leave it to students to figure out a lot of the common knowledge about how to actually use your computer. And in particular, how to use it efficiently. There’s just no class in the undergrad curriculum that teaches you how to become familiar with the system you’re working wi…

> ...[universities] often leave it to students to figure out a lot of the common knowledge about how to actually use your computer. Now I'm out in the real world (MIT class of '86!) I think this is more of an MIT thing -- many graduates of other schools get explicit training in things that the MIT faculty, fairly or not, assumes students will simply pick up. And this is despite the heavy emphasis on actually doing st…

University of Washington CSE added a practical course to get students familiar with Linux and C partly because students are expected mostly to come through other departments / disciplines where the only programming may have come from Java or Python. Students were having great difficulty in higher courses like graphics, OS, compilers, and embedded systems because we weren’t teaching programming courses in our curriculum except maybe our programming languages course itself which covers languages like ML, Scheme, Haskell, or Eiffel and OOP languages like Smalltalk.

Early pilots of the course were put together with a set of Linux guides including bash scripts and Makefiles, source control with svn (hopefully hit by now), and moved quickly into practical stuff with bison / yacc to parse complex files and work with GCC output. I never got to see how well it was received by students but I was glad to see students go through the time-honored traditions of learning CLI tools.

Re: MIT Hacker Tools: a lecture series on programmer tools

#32

Post by alpb »

Jonhoo wrote: post #2

Hi all! We (@anishathalye, @jjgo, and @jonhoo) have long felt that while university CS classes are great at teaching specific topics, they often leave it to students to figure out a lot of the common knowledge about how to actually use your computer. And in particular, how to use it efficiently. There’s just no class in the undergrad curriculum that teaches you how to become familiar with the system you’re working wi…

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLyzOVJj3bHQuiujH1lpn8...

Thanks a lot for this! It appears like the recording doesn't really capture the screen well for multiple videos. I wish it was more professionally done, it could've been useful for years to come.

Re: MIT Hacker Tools: a lecture series on programmer tools

#33

Post by rsfinn »

melling wrote: post #9

MIT went with the Berkeley editor. A lost opportunity to introduce programmers to the beauty of using Emacs and Lisp.

Can't tell whether this is sarcasm or not. Perhaps the expectation is that those things will be acquired naturally; certainly I was immersed in both within two weeks of arriving at MIT. (Admittedly that was in the latter half of the Carter administration; things may be different these days.)

Re: MIT Hacker Tools: a lecture series on programmer tools

#34

Post by snazz »

melling wrote: post #9

MIT went with the Berkeley editor. A lost opportunity to introduce programmers to the beauty of using Emacs and Lisp.

I’m sure a not-insignificant portion will move on to Evil mode.

Vim -> Emacs is a better direction than Emacs -> Vim, because you’ll learn the more efficient editing style, then have access to the better environment, instead of getting used to the great Emacs environment minus the Vim keybindings, and feeling constrained by losing this when moving on to Vim.

Re: MIT Hacker Tools: a lecture series on programmer tools

#35

Post by hinzed1127 »

akhilcacharya wrote: post #6
gumby wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ...[universities] often leave it to students to figure out a lot of the common knowledge about how to actually use your computer. Now I'm out in the real world (MIT class of '86!) I think this is more of an MIT thing -- many graduates of other schools get explicit training in things that the MIT faculty, fairly or not, assumes students will simply pick up. And this is despite the heavy emphasis on actually doing st…

> many graduates of other schools get explicit training in things that the MIT faculty, fairly or not, assumes students will simply pick up. And this is despite the heavy emphasis on actually doing stuff, uh...I graduated from a low tier state school that was notable in our state for focusing on practical matters....and we didn't get 'explicitly trained' on this either. Most people do just pick it up.

I got a CS minor from a top-5 program, and while a lot of the core classes definitely covered some of these topics in various degrees, it's really nice to see all of these aggregated in a concise way.

While you definitely do pick stuff up over time, this is arranged in a way that I could see myself preferring to reference this rather than find that one stack overflow answer that clicked with me at the time. Now that I at least have a better understanding of these concepts 3.5 years into real-world web development, this seems like a good resource to cover my bases better now.

Re: MIT Hacker Tools: a lecture series on programmer tools

#36

Post by snazz »

splittingTimes wrote: post #10

So one lecture covers window managers for tiling. I used dwm for years and love it, but am stuck on Windows at work. Is there anything for Windows 10 that has a similar approach of having a stack with your unused applications and a big window for the app that is in focus? And then you can easily move window from stack to focus and vice versa? I looked at the Wikipedia article [1], but none of the alternatives seem to…

You could have a full-screen Xming session connected to dwm running in WSL, if you liked that better. Of course, you would still have to use the standard Windows DE/WM when using Win32 applications, but if most of your work is text editing, web browsing, etc, you might be well served by the full-screen Xming.

You could start with this guide, which solves a slightly different but related problem: https://virtualizationreview.com/articles/2017/02/08/graphic...

Re: MIT Hacker Tools: a lecture series on programmer tools

#38

Post by idsout »

Jonhoo wrote: post #2

Hi all! We (@anishathalye, @jjgo, and @jonhoo) have long felt that while university CS classes are great at teaching specific topics, they often leave it to students to figure out a lot of the common knowledge about how to actually use your computer. And in particular, how to use it efficiently. There’s just no class in the undergrad curriculum that teaches you how to become familiar with the system you’re working wi…

Thank you so much for sharing your knowledge with the world. I'm excited to follow along with this and I love your Rust streams.

Re: MIT Hacker Tools: a lecture series on programmer tools

#39

Post by anishathalye »

alpb wrote: post #32
Jonhoo wrote: post #2

Hi all! We (@anishathalye, @jjgo, and @jonhoo) have long felt that while university CS classes are great at teaching specific topics, they often leave it to students to figure out a lot of the common knowledge about how to actually use your computer. And in particular, how to use it efficiently. There’s just no class in the undergrad curriculum that teaches you how to become familiar with the system you’re working wi…

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLyzOVJj3bHQuiujH1lpn8... Thanks a lot for this! It appears like the recording doesn't really capture the screen well for multiple videos. I wish it was more professionally done, it could've been useful for years to come.

For most of the videos, we do have screen recordings (e.g. see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VW2jn9Okjhw).

Sadly, we're missing screen recordings for a couple videos (such as the shell video, where we had some issues with the screen recording software). We're thinking of re-doing some of those videos in a screen-cast style so that they'll be more useful for viewers.

Re: MIT Hacker Tools: a lecture series on programmer tools

#40

Post by nmstoker »

Jonhoo wrote: post #2

Hi all! We (@anishathalye, @jjgo, and @jonhoo) have long felt that while university CS classes are great at teaching specific topics, they often leave it to students to figure out a lot of the common knowledge about how to actually use your computer. And in particular, how to use it efficiently. There’s just no class in the undergrad curriculum that teaches you how to become familiar with the system you’re working wi…

Will need to take a deeper look later but from a quick skim I really like the approach taken: a well curated list of time tested tools across each area, going deeper where applicable.

For me the key point above is about a lack of tool knowledge causing "roundabout approaches" and frustration. Knowledge of these tools can do so much to demystify and make the seemingly arcane start to slot into place.

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