Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Missing Semester of Your CS Education

missing.csail.mit.edu

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–180 of 200 posts

Re: The Missing Semester of Your CS Education

#171

Post by gowld »

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…

> Universities believe their focus should be on timeless principles, and expect that students will supplement their instruction as needed.

Why the arbitrary distinction? Why have teachers at all? Surely the students can learn the timeless principles on their own as well.

What matters is where teachers can add value. Sure, you don't need a tenured prof walking students through Intro to Vim and Bash and By The Way GDB Exists", but you do very well to have a TA run a practical lab to teach these things.

Re: The Missing Semester of Your CS Education

#172

Post by gowld »

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…

Why is Compilers an entire course? Databases? Operation Systems? All of these topics are covered in books you can read.

Re: The Missing Semester of Your CS Education

#173

Post by gowld »

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

http://taint.org/2007/01/08/155838a.html

> While reading the log4j manual, I came across this excellent quote from Brian W. Kernighan and Rob Pike’s “The Practice of Programming”:

>> As personal choice, we tend not to use debuggers beyond getting a stack trace or the value of a variable or two. One reason is that it is easy to get lost in details of complicated data structures and control flow; we find stepping through a program less productive than thinking harder and adding output statements and self-checking code at critical places. Clicking over statements takes longer than scanning the output of judiciously-placed displays. It takes less time to decide where to put print statements than to single-step to the critical section of code, even assuming we know where that is. More important, debugging statements stay with the program; debugging sessions are transient.

Re: The Missing Semester of Your CS Education

#174

Post by Anthony-G »

omarhaneef wrote: post #126
dybber wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We previously had the same problem at University of Copenhagen, it was called "the hidden curriculum" among students. When the undergraduate programme was reformed a few years ago these subjects where integrated into various courses, so they could be taught in a learning-by-doing fashion. As part of the first programming and problem-solving class (F#), we also teach LaTeX, Emacs and basic use of the command line, as…

Um, quick question: so should one use Emacs as the University of Copenhagen, or VIM as MIT is teaching? (Just kidding)

That question has already been answered: https://missing.csail.mit.edu/2020/qa/#vim-vs-emacs :)

Re: The Missing Semester of Your CS Education

#175

Post by foobarian »

robterrell wrote: post #135
foobarian wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since you mention scrolling using key repeat - it truly is painful to watch someone do it on default settings. And there are usually better ways to do that sort of thing. But sometimes, there is no substitute: going to the right spot in the middle of a word/line, moving around a page, browser title bars, etc. Here's the kicker though: most keyboard repeat rate settings around have a maximum that is pretty much unusab…

> There are ways to adjust this on OSX too but it's a lot more touchy System preferences > Keyboard > Key repeat rate Adjust the slider to your liking. Works in every app. It's been there since 1984, but to the topic, not many users poke around in system settings anymore. If you want faster than the slider allows, try this from the command line: defaults write -g KeyRepeat -int 1

That's what I mean by more touchy. I think you also can't do this without messing with system integrity protection. And, "1" is the lowest it can go which is not that low IMO. :)

Re: The Missing Semester of Your CS Education

#176

Post by SkyMarshal »

missjellyfish wrote: post #157
slumdev wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Unpopular Opinion: IDEs suck when teaching people programming. A simple Text editor, the simpler the better, is all we need, combined with a compiler. Modern IDEs introduce a boatload of completely irrelevant concepts and complexity that just adds to the confusion. Doesn't matter which one you use. If I was to design a CS101 course, I'd do away with Java (which is the language of choice at my university) as well. I d…

Your opinions aren't unpopular, though maybe old school (in a good way):

https://blog.osteele.com/2004/11/ides

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2005/12/29/the-perils-of-java...

Re: The Missing Semester of Your CS Education

#177

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

fuzzy2 wrote: post #124
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…

That’s cool. Now, on to my possibly unpopular opinion: This isn’t what computer science is about. In fact, you don’t even need to use a computer to do computer science. Sure, some stuff you learn in CS can make you a better software engineer. CS cannot make you a software engineer. CS can definitely not make you adept at using computers and neither should it. That’s something earlier education institutions must tackl…

It's not computer science. It is computer literacy.

Most people who come out of a CS course will go on to become developers, not academics. The course topics are standard domain knowledge for anyone who builds software - not because of specific tools, but because of the concept that scripting and automation tools exist to make development easier.

There is no sense in which being aware of these topics will make you less effective as an academic computer scientist, if that's what you want to be.

Re: The Missing Semester of Your CS Education

#178

Post by selimthegrim »

phlakaton wrote: post #46
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 ou…

Did they remind you to define bool?

Re: The Missing Semester of Your CS Education

#180

Post by phlakaton »

selimthegrim wrote: post #178
phlakaton wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ou…

Did they remind you to define bool?

There was a special set of libraries the class provided that wrapped the standard libraries and made sure that stuff like that was well-defined. (Well, as well-defined as it gets in C anyway.)
Post reply on HN