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The Missing Semester of Your CS Education

missing.csail.mit.edu

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Re: The Missing Semester of Your CS Education

#41

Post by elliotec »

solinent wrote: post #39
lkbm wrote: post #4

In the lab for my second or third CS course, the professor was walking us through intro Unix usage, but he didn't take attendance so it ended up being just 2-4 of us showing up. After a few weeks, he cancelled the lectures and told us he'd just be around to answer questions, help with homework, etc. The last lecture before he cancelled things was an intro to Vim. The next would've been Emacs. And that's the story of…

As someone who uses vim consistently, I hope I'm not a life-long vim user, I plan on at least a short retirement ;)

My wife and I took a month long honeymoon. Really hoped it'd be as close as possible to one of those Tim Ferris-esque "mini retirements." The first morning I awoke early with some serious jet lag and couldn't really figure out what to do while she was still sleeping. So of course I rewrote my whole vim config from scratch and had a blast doing it.

Re: The Missing Semester of Your CS Education

#42

Post by tcbasche »

jsd1982 wrote: post #20

I think the reason you don't see this kind of course offered is because it is primarily concerning training and not education. Imagine if your training course 25 years ago focused on the Turbo C IDE and that's all the University offered. You would be amazingly proficient at Turbo C and know all its keyboard shortcuts but that wouldn't be too relevant in today's market. Keeping such training material up to date with t…

Presumably though there's change in a lot of different fields (not just CS), and it would just be up to whoever is maintaining a course to keep the tools up to date with what's used in industry.

But also, how long has it been since vim/emacs were first used? Or a vcs? I think a lot of this stuff would remain pretty well the same year on year.

Re: The Missing Semester of Your CS Education

#43

Post by pgcj_poster »

All of this seems like stuff I would expect someone studying CS to pick up on their own. I learned to use git in college, but not because anyone taught me: I just figured it out because I had group projects and needed version control. On the other hand, there's no way I could have possibly learned how something like ray-tracing worked without learning it in school or doing some really intense self-study. I feel like it's a waste of class-time to teach stuff like git, shell scripting, etc. If you're smart enough to understand graphics or compilers, you should be able to learn those tools on your own without any trouble.

Re: The Missing Semester of Your CS Education

#44

Post by eqmvii »

Aperocky wrote: post #28
lkbm wrote: post #4

In the lab for my second or third CS course, the professor was walking us through intro Unix usage, but he didn't take attendance so it ended up being just 2-4 of us showing up. After a few weeks, he cancelled the lectures and told us he'd just be around to answer questions, help with homework, etc. The last lecture before he cancelled things was an intro to Vim. The next would've been Emacs. And that's the story of…

Life long vim user that was initiated by the terminal here, vim has a special place in my heart, not because the amount of customization that I was able to add, but because it enabled me to write actual diary. Here's the script. https://github.com/Aperocky/termlife/blob/master/diaryman.sh All I had to do was to type $diary in the terminal and I'm writing my diary in vim. I had never had more extensive record of my li…

I love this! I've been looking for a lighweight diary tool, and this is giving me serious inspiration.

Re: The Missing Semester of Your CS Education

#45

Post by starpilot »

gen220 wrote: post #40

I graduated a top 50 school, that gave us an “engineering” degree but had no such similar course. There were no more than 20 students, out of 300ish, who understood the material of this course well enough to teach it. From my perspective, this knowledge was generally inversely correlated to GPA and strongly correlated to postgrad performance. Take my anecdata for what it is, but I think these skills are strongly unde…

I have those skills, no one in my data science team does. The people with better communication skills, who can gain buy-in from colleagues and raise disagreements without making anyone angry, are doing far better than me despite their lower level of technical competence.

Re: The Missing Semester of Your CS Education

#46

Post by phlakaton »

jsd1982 wrote: post #20

I think the reason you don't see this kind of course offered is because it is primarily concerning training and not education. Imagine if your training course 25 years ago focused on the Turbo C IDE and that's all the University offered. You would be amazingly proficient at Turbo C and know all its keyboard shortcuts but that wouldn't be too relevant in today's market. Keeping such training material up to date with t…

As someone whose intro to programming class WAS built on Turbo C almost thirty years ago, let me tell you how it was:

One day's worth of handouts told you about the IDE.

Another handout was tips for debugging, including common compiler errors and what they meant.

That was it! The rest you learned in the computer cluster, with the help of your dormmate, TA, or computer cluster tutor. The course itself, from then on out, focused (quite rightly IMO) on programming concepts, structures, abstractions, and basic algorithms.

The main computer clusters on campus also had a whole panoply of brochures on how to use Unix, as well as various editors/tools. They were for use by all students, not just the CS students.

In short: it should not take a massive investment of class prep and time to teach students the practicalia they will need to know. Save it for the labs. Don't make a semester course out of it. Include the whole student body as your audience by publishing self-help materials for all.

Re: The Missing Semester of Your CS Education

#47

Post by jacques_chester »

In other engineering disciplines this used to be called "shop class" or similar. In his day my dad was taught as much about carpentry, metal work, plumbing etc as he was taught about radios and circuits.

As an educational technique, "sink or swim" is about as efficient as spinning a wheel and handing out degrees.

Re: The Missing Semester of Your CS Education

#48

Post by pvg »

cosmotic wrote: post #25

Learning about a command-line debugger and command-line profiling tools would be helpful for those that find themselves in the past. IDEA and Visual Studio have had these things integrated for decades. I find the likelihood of knowing how to use a debugger or profiler is inversely proportional to the amount of time someone spends in the terminal. It's astonishing how many developers rely on logging/print statements f…

The browser dev tools of various browsers are debuggers and are very widely used - I'd guess completely independently of amount of time spent in a terminal.

Other factors, post-C, are probably things lots of languages don't have good debuggers or good debuggers take a while to materialize, debuggers are less necessary in managed-runtime languages, etc.

Re: The Missing Semester of Your CS Education

#49

Post by zhdc1 »

starpilot wrote: post #45
gen220 wrote: post #40

I graduated a top 50 school, that gave us an “engineering” degree but had no such similar course. There were no more than 20 students, out of 300ish, who understood the material of this course well enough to teach it. From my perspective, this knowledge was generally inversely correlated to GPA and strongly correlated to postgrad performance. Take my anecdata for what it is, but I think these skills are strongly unde…

I have those skills, no one in my data science team does. The people with better communication skills, who can gain buy-in from colleagues and raise disagreements without making anyone angry, are doing far better than me despite their lower level of technical competence.

This doesn't mean they aren't important though. In academia (not CS), but we use a lot of what's covered in the op MIT guide.

I don't know if this gives an edge at all, and it's certainly 100x less important than soft skills, but there has to be some advantage to knowing how to pull a git repository or how to extract text matches from the command line without having to download or use an external application.

Re: The Missing Semester of Your CS Education

#50

Post by xzel »

I took a Unix half credit course randomly where you basically did bash scripting, a huge bunch of command line tools and then eventually use all that to build your own linux distribution. I swear I learned more in the half credit class, and way more if you try to count it as useful information, than 90% of my other CS courses.

Edit: And since this got some traction, here is the current version of the class: https://www.cis.upenn.edu/~cis191/ it looks pretty similar to what I took but they added a little bit of Python.

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