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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

#61

Post by msaharia »

Jonhoo wrote: post #2

Over the years, we (@anishathalye, @jjgo, @jonhoo) have helped teach several classes at MIT, and over and over we have seen that many students have limited knowledge of the tools available to them. Computers were built to automate manual tasks, yet students often perform repetitive tasks by hand or fail to take full advantage of powerful tools such as version control and text editors. Common examples include holding…

Hi, how are you getting the keystrokes you type in to overlay on the video? Is there a tool you're using for this? Would be very helpful if you could make it.

Re: The Missing Semester of Your CS Education

#62

Post by sn41 »

When someone comes to me these days for knowledge about basic Unix/MacOS/Linux CLI tools, I direct them to the GNU core utilities documentation - it is very nicely organised according to task. I also demonstrate how CLI can do read-based operations as fast as SQL on medium size databases (just take an SQL dump and pipe) -

https://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/manual/html_node/inde...

For various sorting and filtering followed by report generation in latex etc., a knowledge of awk also helps. I use the mawk interpreter since I have found it to be slightly faster with ASCII format files.

Re: The Missing Semester of Your CS Education

#64

Post by gen220 »

jldugger wrote: post #55
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…

> these skills are strongly underrated by universities and students alike. Universities believe their focus should be on timeless principles, and expect that students will supplement their instruction as needed. For example, teaching students the Bourne Again shell isn't useful on Windows, and declining in importance in macOS. Same logic applies to editors, but even more wildly varied. Rather than build 20 courses, o…

In general, I agree with you; I’m not suggesting that the whole degree be built around these tools, just that they should be taught, preferably early on, alongside the traditional intro to CS course.

But it’s not just about the tools, there are some seriously timeless concepts and skills under the surface: regexp, environment variables, users and user groups, documentation comprehension, piping, filesystems, streams, processes, to name a handful. These apply to any Operating System or programming environment, and give some concrete foundation to the theories you learn elsewhere.

Plus, some of these tools really do merit a “timeless” label at this point. VIM, git, bash (and bash-inspired shells), and most of GNU utilities have been around for a very long time and have not been conclusively supplanted by more powerful tools.

Re: The Missing Semester of Your CS Education

#65

Post by Retric »

jldugger wrote: post #55
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…

> these skills are strongly underrated by universities and students alike. Universities believe their focus should be on timeless principles, and expect that students will supplement their instruction as needed. For example, teaching students the Bourne Again shell isn't useful on Windows, and declining in importance in macOS. Same logic applies to editors, but even more wildly varied. Rather than build 20 courses, o…

It takes no great skill to teach any undergraduate CS class. If you’re talking about skills that are still going to be useful in 50 years, Unix scripting is probably one of the strongest competitors. More critically, the basic model of piping commands through a set of simple programs is extremely powerful and widely applicable.

Re: The Missing Semester of Your CS Education

#66

Post by porknubbins »

bachmeier wrote: post #34
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…

> It's astonishing how many developers rely on logging/print statements for debugging. One reason is that you don't switch contexts if you insert a print statement in your code. I personally find that to be the least distracting way to debug.

I’ve tried using GDB and respect those who can, but when I am debugging my short term memory is generally full trying to understand the program code and trying to remember GDB commands clobbers that.

Re: The Missing Semester of Your CS Education

#67

Post by anishathalye »

msaharia wrote: post #61
Jonhoo wrote: post #2

Over the years, we (@anishathalye, @jjgo, @jonhoo) have helped teach several classes at MIT, and over and over we have seen that many students have limited knowledge of the tools available to them. Computers were built to automate manual tasks, yet students often perform repetitive tasks by hand or fail to take full advantage of powerful tools such as version control and text editors. Common examples include holding…

Hi, how are you getting the keystrokes you type in to overlay on the video? Is there a tool you're using for this? Would be very helpful if you could make it.

On macOS, we used this excellent open-source software called KeyCastr: https://github.com/keycastr/keycastr (we used this e.g. in the text editors lecture)

Re: The Missing Semester of Your CS Education

#68

Post by kyralis »

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…

Logging and print statements are phenomenally useful debugging aids. I think people get too caught up in what a debugger can give them and forget how much value you can get out of logging as well.

I'm perfectly happy to fire up LLDB and step through a program, but my go-to first step is frequently to add logs, and one of the reasons is that it's often just plain faster. It's kinda like the binary search of debugging: Sure, I could fire up the debugger and step through the long, complicated, probably multi-threaded algorithm... or I could add some log statements, reproduce, and rapidly narrow down exactly where I should spend my time in the debugger.

If you've got a project with a particularly painful compile time for simple changes (which seems like a whole different issue...) or an issue where setting up a reproduction environment is difficult, then sure, fire up your debugger and set up your breakpoints appropriately. But I think debugging via logging gets a bad rap when it's frequently a completely rational first step.

Re: The Missing Semester of Your CS Education

#69

Post by kyralis »

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…

This is one of the issues that I have with how CS and software engineering is taught in universities.

Yes, you could look at this as "vocational training" and not "education". But you could also look at this as education with a hands-on component using commonly available tools.

Sure, you could have students memorize a list of git commands. That would be terrible. But you could also teach students to understand how a distributed VCS works, the graph operations involved in commands like "checkout", "merge", and "push", and the underlying way of thinking about data and how it changes. That both provides students with an extremely useful practical skill as well as setting them up for understanding much more complicated topics like CRDTs and distributed data synchronization. And when the tool that was used gets replaced, so what? If the concepts used by the tool were taught correctly, then picking up a new one should be trivial. I've been through countless IDEs and debuggers and version control systems in my career, but the reason I can do that is because at some point I learned the first one of each and was then able to transition that knowledge along the way.

"Training" gets looked down in a way that seems actively harmful to me. Just because a tool might not be relevant in the future doesn't mean there's not a huge amount of value that can be gained from learning it today.

Re: The Missing Semester of Your CS Education

#70

Post by kbenson »

xzel wrote: post #50

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://w…

Going through Linux From Scratch[1] manually and reading each component, while allowing yourself the time to look into interesting bits of each, is essentially this. I did it back in the early 2000's, and view it as one of the most useful educations I've ever gotten on how a Unix-like system functions (even if a lot of the knowledge is somewhat obsoleted now for many Linux distros with the introduction of systemd). I was doing it as research for how to ship a custom distro for a small purpose-built device, and while that never panned out, I've never once regretted spending the time to go through the process.

1: http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/

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