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The Missing Semester of Your CS Education (2020)

missing.csail.mit.edu

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Re: The Missing Semester of Your CS Education (2020)

#61

Post by aerhardt »

theonething wrote: post #49

Lots of laudatory comments here about this being essential but missing teaching but I have a different take. The content looks good, nothing wrong with teaching these things. But these things can be and are learned on the job fairly quickly for anyone interested enough in the field and with enough aptitude. In fact, I would say these things can be learned on your own time as a side effect of being interested in compu…

Whether you think that:

a) Universities are places of higher learning that do not need to cater to industry

b) There is an implicit social contract whereby universities should produce industry-ready graduates

c) Something in-between

… the skills taught in this course are as useful for the PhD candidate as for the junior software engineer.

Why leave these out or up to the student, then?

Furthermore, in many other academic disciplines, it’s very common to teach applied technique (eg, on writing essays or structuring research), is this any different?

Re: The Missing Semester of Your CS Education (2020)

#62

Post by noelwelsh »

theonething wrote: post #33
6LLvveMx2koXfwn wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

A talented developer who doesn't know how to set a breakpoint sounds contradictory to me.

There is a world of programming where debuggers don't serve much purpose. Individual microservices are usually trivial, but push complexity into the interactions between services. Debuggers are not much use there; distributed tracing is more relevant. Functional programming, which is a growing part of the industry, really emphasizes code you can easily reason about. That's arguably the whole point of functional programming. Debuggers don't get much use there either.

Re: The Missing Semester of Your CS Education (2020)

#63

Post by 8n4vidtmkvmk »

noisenotsignal wrote: post #60
theonething wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A talented developer who doesn't know how to set a breakpoint sounds contradictory to me.

You don’t need breakpoints all the time though. If you’re familiar with the code (or just “talented”), you might have an intuition for what the problem is and it’s faster to just think through it (and maybe write a few quick prints) instead of interrupting your train of thought setting breakpoints, clicking continue, waiting for the IDE to freaking load the debugging session ( cough Visual Studio), rerunning the test…

+1. i just used a debugger today at my work for the first time in 4 years by coincidence. normally i just throw a couple prints and rerun the test and today i was reminded why. takes like 8 minutes to run the test in debug mode. lots of useful info in there but usually i can guess where the error is without it. it was indeed good at pinpointing the sigsegv though.

Re: The Missing Semester of Your CS Education (2020)

#64

Post by noisenotsignal »

theonething wrote: post #49

Lots of laudatory comments here about this being essential but missing teaching but I have a different take. The content looks good, nothing wrong with teaching these things. But these things can be and are learned on the job fairly quickly for anyone interested enough in the field and with enough aptitude. In fact, I would say these things can be learned on your own time as a side effect of being interested in compu…

I think it’s dependent on the person learning the material. My college had a similar course and it was also highly regarded as useful by students. However, while I found the course fun I already knew most of the basics from my research job, and the advanced stuff hasn’t really come up again even in work (e.g. fancy git or gdb commands), so I’ve entirely forgotten it; my biggest takeaway is probably ctrl r for searching in shell. But I can see why a guided intro would be really helpful to someone who had no experience or some trouble getting started learning this kind of material (which is very different from programming or computer science).

There’s probably an aptitude threshold past which the course’s value diminishes - don’t mean any disrespect to anyone, just trying to expand on your point. The top students either have already figured it out or will do so easily, so they might be better off doing something else with the time they would’ve invested in this. But for a lot of students learning about these tools and concepts can be a real force multiplier, more so than a random upper level course.

Re: The Missing Semester of Your CS Education (2020)

#65

Post by sethaurus »

tomstuart wrote: post #58

The metaprogramming lecture [0] perpetuates the common misunderstanding of what “mocking” is [1], which is unfortunate. [0] https://missing.csail.mit.edu/2020/metaprogramming/#a-brief-... [1] https://martinfowler.com/articles/mocksArentStubs.html

At some point, we might need to accept that "mock" has become a generalised term which refers to many kinds of test-doubles. If it's being taught that way in universities and embodied that way in tooling, then the term has a new meaning.

Re: The Missing Semester of Your CS Education (2020)

#66

Post by Eji1700 »

noelwelsh wrote: post #62
theonething wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A talented developer who doesn't know how to set a breakpoint sounds contradictory to me.

There is a world of programming where debuggers don't serve much purpose. Individual microservices are usually trivial, but push complexity into the interactions between services. Debuggers are not much use there; distributed tracing is more relevant. Functional programming, which is a growing part of the industry, really emphasizes code you can easily reason about. That's arguably the whole point of functional progr…

I'm not a talented developer but I did spend my day on an F# piece of code that builds a databale based on a record type using reflection (and eventually realized it was going to need to be recursive) and I probably would've just quit if I wasn't allowed to use a debugger.

Now maybe if I was better that wouldn't be the case, but even the cleanest "wish i thought of that" functional code i've seen still looks like it'd be easier to fail fast using a debugger with.

In fairness though, I will admit I use the debugger a lot less when i'm not screwing with reflection on generic types or whatever because runtime errors just happen a lot less in functional styles. Usually if it compiles, it runs, because the compiler can sanity check the code better than you can.

Re: The Missing Semester of Your CS Education (2020)

#67

Post by Epa095 »

theonething wrote: post #49

Lots of laudatory comments here about this being essential but missing teaching but I have a different take. The content looks good, nothing wrong with teaching these things. But these things can be and are learned on the job fairly quickly for anyone interested enough in the field and with enough aptitude. In fact, I would say these things can be learned on your own time as a side effect of being interested in compu…

I think it can be useful to distinguish between the "known and unknown unknowns" here. For example, everyone will quickly realise that that they need to know git, and they will learn what they need to know (a known unknown). A university course would maybe save them time, but it would not really change what you know after 2 years in industry. Compared to e.g awk or shell scripting which can be incredible usefull, but maybe not something people realise by themselves that they need (a unknown unknown). A university should make people at least aware of these latter tools.

Re: The Missing Semester of Your CS Education (2020)

#68

Post by noisenotsignal »

noelwelsh wrote: post #62
theonething wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A talented developer who doesn't know how to set a breakpoint sounds contradictory to me.

There is a world of programming where debuggers don't serve much purpose. Individual microservices are usually trivial, but push complexity into the interactions between services. Debuggers are not much use there; distributed tracing is more relevant. Functional programming, which is a growing part of the industry, really emphasizes code you can easily reason about. That's arguably the whole point of functional progr…

Agreed, when I commented earlier I was also thinking about mentioning something similar with regards to classes of bugs due to interactions between systems.

Unless you have a setup where you can easily run one system with a debugger attached while connecting it to everything else, you’re basically restricted to running a debugger for bugs that can be reproduced locally.

Re: The Missing Semester of Your CS Education (2020)

#70

Post by alfiedotwtf »

theonething wrote: post #33
6LLvveMx2koXfwn wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

A talented developer who doesn't know how to set a breakpoint sounds contradictory to me.

I read a long time ago, that either Kernighan or Ritchie said they never use a debugger and just sprinkle printf() statements.
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