The Missing Semester of Your CS Education • Hacker News Board

Re: The Missing Semester of Your CS Education

#141

Post by swiley » Tue, Feb 04, 2020, 2:48 PM UTC

slumdev wrote: post #129

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…

You use Vim in your example. Get your students out of it and into something like IntelliJ IDEA or VS Code or (at a bare minimum) Eclipse.

Why? What’s wrong with vim, gdb, and some static analysis tools like cscope and a linter?

IDEs confuse people, a lot of them start to think you can’t have the compiler/debugger/build automations without the editor and start doing stupid things because of that.

Re: The Missing Semester of Your CS Education

#142

Post by Nitramp » Tue, Feb 04, 2020, 2:56 PM UTC

swiley wrote: post #139

Nitramp wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Science doesn't abstractly drop from the heavens, fully formed. Every science has practical enablers that are required to get stuff done. Astronomers use telescopes, physicists/chemists/etc use lab equipment, Mathematicians use various notations and other tricks (and nowadays proof assistants) to make their job easier. MS Office might not be practical for computer science (also note how the OP doesn't list that), but…

They should be writing them in asciidoc (or even markdown) and using style sheets if they really need complex formatting!!! (although at least latex is decent at typesetting and has nice defaults.)

Yes. I intended that more as an abstract example for a tool that's useful to do science, but clearly not a science in of itself[1].

Though latex might still come in handy once you actually want to submit papers to journals, or for a thesis. YMMV.

[1] then again, if I remember my feeble attempts to write latex macros, maybe the emergent behaviour of common latex packages would be a good research subject? ;-)

Re: The Missing Semester of Your CS Education

#143

Post by hatmatrix » Tue, Feb 04, 2020, 3:02 PM UTC

awbraunstein wrote: post #98

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!

He recently had a really interesting talk called Emacs: The Editor for the Next Forty Years [1]

[1] https://youtu.be/KYcY7CcS7nc

Re: The Missing Semester of Your CS Education

#144

Post by hatmatrix » Tue, Feb 04, 2020, 3:04 PM UTC

bigj0n wrote: post #122

theLotusGambit wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 pac…

I think that structure, accountability, and community are the big draws towards school. For young people I think that these are extremely important- when I was in school- taking 6 classes meant I spent a roughly 40 hour work week on school stuff. I had a really hard time doing half of those hours when I wasnt in school. Obviously that's more of a me issue than an issue inherent to self-learning, but many of us have m…

I guess part of "community" is your peer group, but also access to an authority to whom you can address questions (that won't leave you hanging, most of the time).

Re: The Missing Semester of Your CS Education

#145

Post by tikiman163 » Tue, Feb 04, 2020, 3:16 PM UTC

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 read through the article, and a lot of what you've got looks really useful. Your explanation of GIT and source control is especially valuable. These are all pretty much skills a good programmer should have, but I would make one exception.

Personally, I like and have frequently used VIM. It's a useful tool to know how to use if you need to edit text files on a GUI-less system. However, I have yet to meet a single programmer with any ability to work as a team member that chooses to use VIM while using an OS with a desktop environment. VIM does have an interesting and valuable ideology, but that ideology isn't perfect and I worry that exposing new programmers to only one command line text editor and itss specific ideology might provide too narrow of a perspective. It might be a good idea to alsi present the ideologies behind other command line text editing approaches such as perl scripting and regex in order to update many files in order to widen their perspective and consider what they need to do while selecting the tool to use.

Re: The Missing Semester of Your CS Education

#146

Post by BlueTemplar » Tue, Feb 04, 2020, 3:48 PM UTC

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…

Me too... except it's a somewhat simpler, but required course for ALL students, not just those in CS ! (A bit understaffed - or maybe not - inter-student cooperation worked well enough!)

Re: The Missing Semester of Your CS Education

#147

Post by nandkeypull » Tue, Feb 04, 2020, 3:58 PM UTC

CMU has a similar course called "Great Practical Ideas for Computer Scientists" (a play off of the infamous "Great Theoretical Ideas in Computer Science") at https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~15131/f17/.

Re: The Missing Semester of Your CS Education

#148

Post by haileris » Tue, Feb 04, 2020, 4:05 PM UTC

Good as a primer for those that aren't naturally hackers but decided to become computer science majors and have little to no experience with a unix-like operating system.

I learned Linux, the shell, basic scripting, and the terminal environment in high school out of necessity and then began to thoroughly enjoy it. Planning to enter university as a CS student I took the time to learn Vim, though I didn't start using it regularly until much later.

I can't exactly articulate why, but I'm fairly upset these sorts of things comprise an entire course. What happened to RTFM? Where is the general curiosity? Even if you have no prior experience with a majority of these things, these are the kinds of things you figure out over the weekend while doing your regular courseload.

Re: The Missing Semester of Your CS Education

#149

Post by HPsquared » Tue, Feb 04, 2020, 4:07 PM UTC

haileris wrote: post #148

Good as a primer for those that aren't naturally hackers but decided to become computer science majors and have little to no experience with a unix-like operating system. I learned Linux, the shell, basic scripting, and the terminal environment in high school out of necessity and then began to thoroughly enjoy it. Planning to enter university as a CS student I took the time to learn Vim, though I didn't start using i…

It's kind of like a special class to teach engineering students about all the features on their graphing calculator.

Re: The Missing Semester of Your CS Education

#150

Post by HPsquared » Tue, Feb 04, 2020, 4:13 PM UTC

kbenson wrote: post #70

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…

This - it methodically takes you through all the little details inside the system that are usually taken for granted and hugely improved my confidence working with Linux. It also taught me a lot of what's in this class (e.g. editors, shell scripting, even a fair bit of troubleshooting)