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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

#81

Post by ameixaseca »

Metaprogramming has an actual meaning and it means something completely different from what it is used for on this website:

"Metaprogramming is a programming technique in which computer programs have the ability to treat other programs as their data." [1]

i.e.: it's a programming technique and not something related to any process related to building code.

I understand the idea of giving some more practical side of using computers in a "missing semester", but please pay attention to the nomenclature. It can be really confusing for someone studying CS that does not yet grasp the concepts that well.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metaprogramming

Re: The Missing Semester of Your CS Education

#82

Post by cosmotic »

jakear wrote: post #72
kyralis wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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:…

Logging is also less likely to disturb the rest of the program, in my experience (JS). If I want to figure out in what order a set of things executes, I could just add some `console.log('hello')`, `console.log('helloooo')`, `console.log('does this even get called?')`, etc's around and see how they get spat out, or I could add a bunch of breakpoints, mess with the ordering of the event loop, and spend a bunch of extra…

JS has it's own debugger problems, largely because of transpilers and the shattered ecosystem surrounding them. Source maps help but aren't perfect.

Re: The Missing Semester of Your CS Education

#83

Post by duxup »

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…

Testing and debugging is still a weak spot for me.

I did a bit of dorking around with web development on my own, decided to change careers, needless to say the boot camp didn't cover any of that and the 3 dev company I ended up with we're still trying to wrangle together good practices and pull old code into the future to the point that we're not doing nearly as much testing as we should... so I'm left to my own devices.

Even my usual web resources don't really cover much in the way of JavaScript / Node debugging outside "here is how you set something up ... k bye!".

Re: The Missing Semester of Your CS Education

#84

Post by Galanwe »

ameixaseca wrote: post #81

Metaprogramming has an actual meaning and it means something completely different from what it is used for on this website: "Metaprogramming is a programming technique in which computer programs have the ability to treat other programs as their data." [1] i.e.: it's a programming technique and not something related to any process related to building code. I understand the idea of giving some more practical side of us…

“Meta” means “one level of abstraction above”. I find it perfectly okay to use it in this context.

Re: The Missing Semester of Your CS Education

#85

Post by cosmotic »

ken wrote: post #71
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 quality of debuggers varies hugely, especially since different languages support different debugging features (e.g., conditions vs exceptions vs neither). Logging works pretty much the same everywhere.

I have never used a language that doesn't support visual debugging from the editor except maybe embedded c. Considering the complexity of "logging frameworks", logging is not always as easy as it may sound.

Re: The Missing Semester of Your CS Education

#86

Post by MereInterest »

Galanwe wrote: post #84
ameixaseca wrote: post #81

Metaprogramming has an actual meaning and it means something completely different from what it is used for on this website: "Metaprogramming is a programming technique in which computer programs have the ability to treat other programs as their data." [1] i.e.: it's a programming technique and not something related to any process related to building code. I understand the idea of giving some more practical side of us…

“Meta” means “one level of abstraction above”. I find it perfectly okay to use it in this context.

The point isn't whether a word fits a definition, but whether that word already has a definition with which the new definition will be confused.

Re: The Missing Semester of Your CS Education

#87

Post by theLotusGambit »

xkemp wrote: post #26
sombremesa wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The world's best CS school is an internet connection.

I'm entirely self-taught and can entirely understand wanting that belief to be true, but it just isn't. A university can give you so much more than just learning some programming language. At the very least, it's going to force you to dabble in some languages you wouldn't ordinarily touch. The same obviously goes for theory. Assuming there are at least some things that require a minimum effort that is uncomfortable b…

> Assuming there are at least some things that require a minimum effort that is uncomfortable before allowing you to see their benefits, you will discover more guided by qualified people and well-designed curricula than on your own.

Perhaps, but sitting in the lecture hall isn't the only way you can get thorough instruction from professionals. Books exist, and they don't suffer from the same monetary, timing, and pacing issues that classrooms do.

The primary historical disadvantage of books- that they weren't interactive and you therefore couldn't get help if stuck- is no longer an issue with the internet. It's possible that the internet is too disorganized and low-quality to be one's primary teacher, but its amazing supplementary value makes other media tenable.

Those are my anecdotal opinions, anyway. But I'm curious, what do you think physical teachers have to offer that Books/Online Courses/Podcasts/Whatever + The Internet don't?

Re: The Missing Semester of Your CS Education

#88

Post by commandersaki »

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…

I did a similar Unix course. It was on quarter based system so it only lasted 3 months. We learned Unix from first principles. There were programming assignments that started off as shell scripts. We wrote manpages for our shell scripts. Then we learned C with the expectation you figure out the hard parts really really quickly (we were a Java school). We implemented various different C and Unix programs. We even reimplemented some of our shell scripts. We implemented a custom version of ls(1) with built-in sorting features.

In the last 3 weeks we built a full-blown Bourne shell in C including background jobs, shell/environment variables, pipelines, i/o redirection, lex/yacc parsing, etc. A lot of the features were extra credit (e.g. single pipeline a | b, versus infinite pipeline a | b | ...).

The class is unforgettable in my mind. I now mentally parse everything I do in the shell and imagine system call tracing every program I run.

Re: The Missing Semester of Your CS Education

#89

Post by vaughnegut »

tombert wrote: post #59

I can't speak for any other schools, but before I dropped out of Florida State, they had a class called "Intro to Unix", which was only worth one credit. We all were given login credentials to a server and our assignments were typically Bash scripts; there was one class spent on Vi, and the professor combined the Nano and Emacs class together. We also learned how to do Makefiles and how to run GCC... I had assumed th…

Very wrong, unfortunately. At my school there are students halfway through their degree who can't switch a git branch without using a drop-down menu in their IDE (and even then with difficulty) or have ever used the CLI for anything. The place students tend to learn these things is their internship. The first one is typically a turning point in their programming and tools ability

Re: The Missing Semester of Your CS Education

#90

Post by lmwnshn »

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…

FWIW, Carnegie Mellon runs a "tools of the trade" course which is targeted to CS first-years, GPI [0], that is mostly taught by student TAs with the supervision of a professor. Asking students to create and teach the material seems to be a great way of solving this problem; TAs get teaching experience, students learn about the tools, professors are not duly overburdened.

[0] https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~07131/f19/

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