Caltech's mechanical engineering program did not teach you how to use machine tools. The courses were all math, more math, lotsa math, a heapin helpin of math, with a side dish of math.
The Missing Semester of Your CS Education (2020)
21–30 of 347 posts
Re: The Missing Semester of Your CS Education (2020)
#22It's amazing how many CS programs fail to teach you even the basic tools of being a software developer. Yes, yes, CS is not programming, but there is a non-trivial amount of CS that is indeed programming, and that is generally what people do with their CS degrees, so it'd make sense for a CS program to teach the basics. Maybe even more than the basics.
In India we usually call it "Computer Science & Engineering".
But name is the only thing we get right in CS education.
Re: The Missing Semester of Your CS Education (2020)
#23I love vim, it's great to know how to navigate it, but I have met very few people who use it professionally. I'd love to hear others' experiences, there.
I use Vim infrequently. I know it and if it was the only option I'd be efficient with it. I've even started with Vi as the only option. However I prefer Emacs because I feel way more efficient and comfortable with it. As a bonus main key bindings are consistent with Bash and others GNU tools. The course should introduce Emacs as well so that students can choose on their own. Whatever your preferred editor is IMHO it is up to an IDE to integrate with it.
Re: The Missing Semester of Your CS Education (2020)
#24It's amazing how many CS programs fail to teach you even the basic tools of being a software developer. Yes, yes, CS is not programming, but there is a non-trivial amount of CS that is indeed programming, and that is generally what people do with their CS degrees, so it'd make sense for a CS program to teach the basics. Maybe even more than the basics.
CS programs prepare you first and foremost for a PhD in CS. They're great for learning the theory and fundamentals, but teach practical Software Engineering skills as a side effect.
Re: The Missing Semester of Your CS Education (2020)
#25I love vim, it's great to know how to navigate it, but I have met very few people who use it professionally. I'd love to hear others' experiences, there.
I switched to vim in college, never went back. That was 20 years ago.
Re: The Missing Semester of Your CS Education (2020)
#26The content taught here is the highest payout thing you can learn, in my opinion. Certainly more important than actually writing code or learning algos. What this content covers should unlock iteration speed, which is the single greatest lever in learning and growing faster (on a computer). Thus it gives you more cycles to go back to improving your code, experimenting with algos, etc. Probably also highly correlated…
I went to Purdue over a decade ago and we had a 1 credit hour lab that taught this stuff. Unix command line, git, bash, and finally some python. Like you said, it's been a complete game changer. I feel these skills continue to differentiate me from my peers in terms of how I can attack arbitrary problems bravely to this day.
They still teach this stuff at Purdue. I graduated a few years ago and by far the most important class was about how unix works, moving around the command line and finally introducing us to vim
Re: The Missing Semester of Your CS Education (2020)
#27The content taught here is the highest payout thing you can learn, in my opinion. Certainly more important than actually writing code or learning algos. What this content covers should unlock iteration speed, which is the single greatest lever in learning and growing faster (on a computer). Thus it gives you more cycles to go back to improving your code, experimenting with algos, etc. Probably also highly correlated…
I sat with a talented developer whilst we wrestled with a threading issue this past week. I wanted to inspect the value of a variable within a method during execution and asked him to set a breakpoint. He didn't know how to do that in the IDE, which he'd been using for over a year. Debugging is indeed a skill which needs learning.
Re: The Missing Semester of Your CS Education (2020)
#28I love vim, it's great to know how to navigate it, but I have met very few people who use it professionally. I'd love to hear others' experiences, there.
I use it professionally and personally for all text editing, even just taking plain notes. I feel handicapped without it.
Re: The Missing Semester of Your CS Education (2020)
#29I love vim, it's great to know how to navigate it, but I have met very few people who use it professionally. I'd love to hear others' experiences, there.
I use neovim with Ale plugin for LSP and linters. Somehow it maps into my brain better than anything else. Its fast, on cli, feature rich, usable without a mouse...
The only thing where vim/neovim really sucks against other tools is the project specific configuration.
Re: The Missing Semester of Your CS Education (2020)
#30My university (ANU in Australia) added a course very similar to this along side their first year courses. Didn’t get to see the results, but having tutored the years before the course’s introduction it was certainly… necessary