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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

#91

Post by brlewis »

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…

My feedback is to keep doing what you're doing. Some people will talk about how this kind of mundane training might not be relevant some years later. By the same reasoning students shouldn't learn the layout of their campus or how to add and drop courses, because those skills won't be relevant after they graduate. Keep helping students not waste time now on tasks that should be simple.

Re: The Missing Semester of Your CS Education

#93

Post by abhisuri97 »

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…

Nice to see some Penn alum on HN :)

Re: The Missing Semester of Your CS Education

#94

Post by 0x445442 »

cosmotic wrote: post #80
veeralpatel979 wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ruby has a great debugging story. You just type "binding.pry" wherever you'd like to stop the application and in your terminal, it will open a Ruby shell where you can access the program state at that point in your code. https://github.com/pry/pry

If I sorted debuggers I've used by how great they are, they would all be better than that ruby debugger, including visual basic 3 for windows 3.1.

Yeah when I hear great debugging story I’m thinking Smalltalk, not Ruby PRY.

Re: The Missing Semester of Your CS Education

#95

Post by kamaal »

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…

Learning to use the editor macros well, could save anyone lots of effort typing. And should definitely be in your course.

Re: The Missing Semester of Your CS Education

#96

Post by ip26 »

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…

"I choose a lazy person to do a hard job. Because a lazy person will find an easy way to do it." -- Bill Gates

Some people just accept absurd drudgery interacting with computers; it never even occurs to them to seek an easier way. But if you can teach the students to be "lazy" when it comes to that kind of repetitive drudgery, they'll be set for life.

Re: The Missing Semester of Your CS Education

#97

Post by ladberg »

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…

Interesting that you think it's inversely correlated with GPA. At my school, I feel like the people who are experts with the terminal and *nix stuff are the ones who have high GPAs because they are at the top of all the CS classes.

Re: The Missing Semester of Your CS Education

#98

Post by awbraunstein »

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 took this class as well and agree that it was the most useful course I took at Penn. I still use all of the things that I learned in this class every day (especially emacs). Luckily, I took it early in school and it made subsequent classes so much easier. Thank you Perry Metzger!

Re: The Missing Semester of Your CS Education

#99

Post by BurningFrog »

ip26 wrote: post #96
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…

"I choose a lazy person to do a hard job. Because a lazy person will find an easy way to do it." -- Bill Gates Some people just accept absurd drudgery interacting with computers; it never even occurs to them to seek an easier way. But if you can teach the students to be "lazy" when it comes to that kind of repetitive drudgery, they'll be set for life.

I think the problem is more a lack of imagination. They just keep doing things the way they always have.

I seem to have a surplus both of "there has to be a better way"-itis, and some skill in finding such ways.

Re: The Missing Semester of Your CS Education

#100

Post by gen220 »

jldugger wrote: post #76
Retric wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Perhaps my experience was atypical, but freshman year included a course on proofs of correctness, starting from propositional logic and ending with LTL (comparable in concept to the system Lamport published as TLA+). Upper level course often included a hands-on section on PROMELA. These are not something I would expect a rando practitioner to know about or teach, and only rarely put into practice (albeit to good effe…

I'm not trying to be cheeky, but you're proving the point: I'd argue that UNIX systems and tools are the foundation of AWS, not TLA+. Amazon was famous for being held together with Perl, back in the day.

If your service or company survives long enough for the marginal cost of applying TLA+ to it to be worthwhile, you can afford to hire postdocs to work on it. They probably have 10 people using TLA+ on it. There are probably 500 software engineering teams in the world that are mature enough where the payoff is worth it.

It's not to say that TLA+ isn't useful, or that it isn't worth learning. It's just that TLA+ is never going to be a bedrock tool in the same way that UNIX systems knowledge is.

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