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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)

#211

Post by a_e_k »

closeparen wrote: post #194
ghaff wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's definitely a thing with CS that, at least at more elite schools, there's an assumption that you more or less know how to program--at least a language like Python--and you also more or less know your way around a computer well enough to use it as a tool for programming. (Or you pick it up quickly on the side along with your full course load.) This is more or less unique among college majors outside of some art…

My school handled this cleverly by taking people with prior programming experience into a Haskell sequence, which suitably kicked our asses to the same degree as what the first-time programmers were getting.

My college's CS program did the same, but with Scheme back in the day.

I can't complain, since I was introduced to Emacs along the way, which I still use heavily to this day. And while I don't really use Scheme anymore, it made Elisp trivial to figure out.

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

#212

Post by analog31 »

ghaff wrote: post #165
ClumsyPilot wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of those cases that some people are so unreasonable, you can't tell what's sarcas m

I sort of get that, in this day and age, it would probably seem a bit unusual for someone to show up at Stanford or MIT and be like "I've only ever used a computer to play video games but I think I'll major in CS." On the other hand, I also don't think programming had to be an all-consuming passion for the past 10 years as some seem to deeply believe.

I think there actually may be some of this. Both of my kids are in college right now, but I knew a lot of high school kids and their parents through the extracurriculars that my kids were involved in. The kids knew what the "hot" college majors were, including CS.

But they also knew the precise formula for college entrance, and were laser focused on getting into an "elite" school. Any activity that didn't contribute to that process was eschewed.

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

#213

Post by RheingoldRiver »

kriro wrote: post #203
RheingoldRiver wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Ah, that makes sense. The reason is that I was a math major and now doing programming, have lamented my LaTeX being utterly useless; the only thing I use it for is (perhaps somewhat ironically) my resume document, and I've forgotten so much that I don't even list it on my resume (if I even thought it was relevant).

But I had not considered that during the degree program itself, you will lose LaTeX quite frequently, which of course does make sense.

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

#214

Post by dizwit »

ClumsyPilot wrote: post #162
Salgat wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Once I learned how to use vs code productively it really changed my mind. The other day I needed to do a quick base64 encode and vs code had that. Same goes for formatting some json or doing a diff. It's all available in a single tool with no learning curve. Hell it even has git and git blame in there.

Vs Code is the gateway drug of real IDE's. Last time I checked, it still cant do things like navigate to definition, or rename a calss along with all mentions of it in comments. Or count TODO: comments

navigate to definition -> f12

rename all instances of class/method/variable -> f2

count TODOs: too many vs code plugins that will do that for you

Not sure when the last time you checked, but vs code is a practical full fledged IDE with the right plugins.

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

#215

Post by devwastaken »

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…

"Universities were pressured into lowering credits to grad"

Uni's are requiring more generals, especially humanities. The problem isn't credit requirements, it's accreditation, marketing, and politics.

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

#216

Post by anthomtb »

mydriasis wrote: post #3

I 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.

Of the 10 developers I work with the most, 9 are vim users and one is VSCode. The VSCode guy won’t shut up about it but then he is also the proselytizing type.

Honest, I’m not that attached to vim and mainly keep using it because it’s what my colleagues use. If everyone suddenly switched to VSCode I would follow the herd. The only thing about vim that I love, and would not give up, is the keybindings and I am sure I could find a decent plug-in for that.

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

#217

Post by [deleted] »

dls2016 wrote: post #209
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 h…

[deleted]

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

#220

Post by thfuran »

bmikaili wrote: post #191
thfuran wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In approximately the same way that knowing how to type has nothing to do with computer science.

True, that also has nothing to do with computer science.

Nor does knowing how to read, yet all of those things are useful in studying computer science.
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