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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)

#201

Post by throwaway2037 »

arghnoname wrote: post #78
Transfinity wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi! I'm that person! Senior engineer, decade of experience. I've used debuggers in the past, both for running code and looking at core dumps, but I really don't find them to be cost effective for the vast majority of problems. Just write a print statement! So when I switched from C to python and go a couple jobs ago, I never bothered learning how to use the debuggers for those languages. I don't miss them.

I am also this person. I'm a systems programmer (kernel and systems software, often in C, C++, golang, bit of rust, etc) What I find is that if my code isn't working, I stop what I'm doing. I look at it. I think really hard, I add some print statements and asserts to verify some assumptions, and I iterate a small handful of times to find my faulty assumption and fix it. Many, many times during the 'think hard' and lo…

Your list of programming languages excluded Java. Please ignore this reply if Java is included.

Are you aware of the amazing Java debugger feature of "Drop to Frame"? Combined with "hot-injection" (compile new code, then inject into current debug'd JVM), it is crazy and amazing. (I love C#, but the hot-injection feature is much worse than Java -- more than 50% of the time, C# compiler rejects my hot-injection, but about 80% of the time, JVM accepts my hot-injection.) When working on source code where it is very difficult to acquire data for the algorithm, having the ability to inspect in a debugger, make minor changes the the algorithm, then re-compile, inject new class/method defs, the drop to frame, the re-exec the same code in the same debug session is incredibly powerful.

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

#202

Post by Encrust6221 »

tkiolp4 wrote: post #122
dfee wrote: post #2

The 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…

Indeed. While I think learning algorithms and ds is a non-negotiable thing, in 90% of the companies out there in 90% of the situations one will never have to write a binary search from scratch or implement a queue from scratch. On the other hand, profiling, debugging, glueing things together via bash, etc., that’s what distinguishes you from the colleges who only write passable code.

I dropped out after a year of college and have since weaseled my way into a dev position, your observation could not be more true in my experience. I've since strongly considered going back to school for a degree, but as interesting and probably useful some of the material may be, I'm not convinced it's worth it as an investment into making me better at my job.

If only I could use 529 funds on some of these online course providers.

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

#203

Post by kriro »

RheingoldRiver wrote: post #195
jcelerier wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I do not know many others who implemented something like that. the school I did in france, ENSEIRB-MATMECA, started with three weeks where you only learn shell commands, emacs, LaTeX etc before doing anything else. Here are the slides (in french sorry, although they all have useful reference cards at the end): - intro: http://mfaverge.vvv.enseirb-matmeca.fr/wordpress/wp-content/... - unix, shell: https://cours-mf.g…

LaTeX? Is this a dual math-cs program?

I find this comment a bit odd. I teach CS and our students are required to use LaTeX for everything they hand in (internship report, project work, BA thesis). We also publish everything using LaTeX if possible. There's some conferences which use Word templates (shudder) but mostly it's LaTeX.

Citations and bibliography management are easy, it's super easy to switch from IEEE to Harvard or whatever and as soon as you have diagrams, graphs, tables or formulas it's a no brainer.

Pretty curious why you associate LaTeX with "math only". AFAIK it's absolutely standard to use it in CS. It's also quite easy these days. We provide templates for the students and they usually use Overleaf so there's very little hassle with setting up the entire environment.

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

#204

Post by sidlls »

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 haven’t been shocked that fellow engineers don’t know how to use a debugger for at least ten years. Most jobs in the industry can be done adequately without getting into tools that low level.

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

#205

Post by eslaught »

lordnacho wrote: post #92
dfee wrote: post #2

The 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 have this feeling that the kids who appear better at uni are the ones who happened to pick up certain not-quite-programming skills before they started. Basics of networking, how installation of programs happens, how to use the command line, that kind of thing. I looked over her shoulder as my wife was doing a CS degree, and I realised there's a bunch of these little things that make life a lot easier if you know th…

This doesn't fit my experience.

I mean, yes, this was me. I came in knowing most/all of this. I knew six (or more?) programming languages, had at least played with CVS/SVN, had installed Linux (read: fought with the Linux bootloader to get my AMD CPU to boot without crashing), had dipped my toe in a few open source communities.

But I was a tutor in college and I interacted with a bunch of people who didn't come in with any of this experience. Many of those people struggled, but I also know a bunch of people who came into CS knowing nothing, loved it, and went from zero-to-sixty faster than even the people who came in knowing a lot.

I'm still not sure I can identify what the ingredient was, but experience alone is not enough to explain it.

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

#206

Post by gumby »

readingnews wrote: post #170

I have tried in vain to get this implemented at our uni. I can say a few things I find interesting: - Students used to get this stuff but no longer do, for example all workstations used to be unix, so when you left, you "knew" "unix" (shell, vim, etc) - Due to things like ABET, classes are crammed with need-to-know-for-accreditation info so, well, some items need to go by the wayside (many are in the MIT list) - Ther…

This “MIT Course” was taught by grad students because they felt the actual course work left this out.

So when you say it’s a shame your uni doesn’t teach this, well, that’s what these grad students were saying as well. Perhaps the students could seize the initiative at your institution as well?

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

#207

Post by jimbo9991 »

btheshoe wrote: post #97

I personally don't like the undertone of the class (tho very grateful that this material exists!!!) - this idea that universities are failing their students by not teaching them necessary material. I think a better phrasing is that students are failing themselves by not learning the material. I've personally never considered it the responsibility of my university to educate me - some of the classes are certainly usef…

People are going to really dislike what you said but I agree to a certain extent, especially when it comes to the basics of working in the command line. If somebody can't read the manual on that and figure it out then they are going to be so hopeless for so many other things that I don't want anything to do with them.

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

#208

Post by jimbo9991 »

enumjorge wrote: post #140
btheshoe wrote: post #97

I personally don't like the undertone of the class (tho very grateful that this material exists!!!) - this idea that universities are failing their students by not teaching them necessary material. I think a better phrasing is that students are failing themselves by not learning the material. I've personally never considered it the responsibility of my university to educate me - some of the classes are certainly usef…

I think you’re conflating two different things: universities selecting and presenting a syllabus needed to earn a certain degree, and students actually learning the material. The latter is the solely the responsibility of each student, but I don’t understand why the former would be. Some of the content in this course strikes me as unknown unknowns for new programmers. Why would they be to blame if no one told them to…

Honestly, because its something that should be a prerequisite for starting the degree program in the same way basic algebra is a prerequisite. Likewise, not knowing you need to know this stuff is a sign that you are probably not at the point where you should even be able to have declared the major. The fact that colleges allow this at all is doing a disservice to students, many of whom will go on to permanently damage their academic records.

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

#209

Post by dls2016 »

readingnews wrote: post #170

I have tried in vain to get this implemented at our uni. I can say a few things I find interesting: - Students used to get this stuff but no longer do, for example all workstations used to be unix, so when you left, you "knew" "unix" (shell, vim, etc) - Due to things like ABET, classes are crammed with need-to-know-for-accreditation info so, well, some items need to go by the wayside (many are in the MIT list) - Ther…

Thank you for making the point about accreditation, it's sort of a pet peeve of mine. I taught "intro to C++" last year at the Harrisburg campus of PSU. The students were a mix of non-CS majors who didn't know what a file was, a handful of students who already knew how to program and a bunch in the middle.

Re: accreditation... the admin is very reluctant to change anything about the courses. Even specific textbooks had to be recommended (I was warned for suggesting in the syllabus that the textbook wasn't needed). Seemed a little more strict than teaching mathematics, which I did in graduate school.

Re: kids these days... a significant portion didn't understand the concept of a file. I blame apps and the cloud (funny because I now work in cloud storage). I ended up writing my own pre-cursor doc to the "missing semester". It was challenge to get a student from not understanding the filesystem to having some sort of understanding of linear search and pointers. (If you're interested: https://www.dropbox.com/s/jar1r0l5vdgspcl/basics.pdf?dl=0)

I tried to stress, especially to the non-majors, that this "missing" stuff was perhaps the most important thing they could learn. That, and how to properly google/search for things. I would experiment and try to re-word homework questions so that interesting StackOverflow answers appeared in search results.

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

#210

Post by anthomtb »

There’s a struggling developer on my team and this course covers everything he is having trouble with.

Writing performant code? He does a fine job.

Setting up an environment, navigating a couple terminals and getting code into revision control? He is completely lost. Someone basically has to do it for him.

I’m going to send this course material to his manager* and hopefully a few weeks from now the team stress levels will be greatly reduced.

*yes, company culture dictates that it would not be appropriate for me to flat out say to him “dude you suck and here’s a way to be better”.

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