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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)

#231

Post by btilly »

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?

LaTeX was written by a famous computer scientist to write a computer science book.

Yes, mathematicians love it. But computer scientists were first there.

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

#232

Post by 2OEH8eoCRo0 »

I'm torn on this. As somebody who is too stupid to goto MIT, I chuckle thinking of spoon-feeding how to use Git or a terminal to MIT students. It's useful information but not everything useful needs a sit-down, by-the-numbers, "this is how you branch" discussion. I also wonder if it does more harm than good teaching these topics so matter-of-factly since it's only the current programming zeitgeist anyway. It only further entrenches the "way things are". Like depriving children of that impactful exploratory phase and sticking them into a rigid box. In any case- won't these topics propagate natually from good professors using them themselves? What do I know, I'm too stupid to attend MIT.

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

#233

Post by MacroChip »

My university had Dijkstra's quote "Computer science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes". They made us aware of tools and we were free to use them as little or as much as possible to do the science. I always assumed that software engineering degrees focused on tools more than computer science degrees (among other differences).

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

#234

Post by no_wizard »

wirthjason wrote: post #224
dls2016 wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

C++ needs a “missing semester” around tooling. Most material I see focus on the core language but leave out setting up build systems, package management, clang tidy, testing etc.

How do you do package management in C/C++?

I have only used pip, cargo, npm (well yarn and pnpm mostly) and composer.

Big off putting aspect of learning C/C++ is that I can’t grok how shared libraries work very well

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

#235

Post by bordercases »

2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote: post #232

I'm torn on this. As somebody who is too stupid to goto MIT, I chuckle thinking of spoon-feeding how to use Git or a terminal to MIT students. It's useful information but not everything useful needs a sit-down, by-the-numbers, "this is how you branch" discussion. I also wonder if it does more harm than good teaching these topics so matter-of-factly since it's only the current programming zeitgeist anyway. It only fur…

The field has grown to the point that if you don't teach it top down no one will have the skills to be dangerous until the end of their degree. And projects that shorten the size of that stack still come out of MIT.

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

#236

Post by adrianmonk »

RomanPushkin wrote: post #157

Vim? Really? No text editor will make you a good programmer. I barely use/know Vim with 20 years of programming experience.

I think the point is to not leave yourself in a position where you're not proficient with any text editor at all.

This is an actual issue. Some students show up at college without ever having written a line of code and without knowing how to open a plain text file, make changes to it, and save it.

It doesn't matter that much which one you learn. If you already have an opinion about which one you like better, you're already where you need to be and can skip the section on editors. If you learn vim and don't like it, you can learn a different editor.

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

#237

Post by mixmastamyk »

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…

Sphinx, asciidoc, mkdocs etc more accessible these days.

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

#238

Post by mixmastamyk »

whynotminot wrote: post #159
bjourne wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had a guitar tutor once and I asked him if I honestly had a chance to get into the Royal College of Music. He said absolutely, no problem, as long as you practice for at least two hours per day. Every day. For the next ten years... High-level CS is the same and I don't see any reason why it should be different. There is just no, or very little, time to teach introductory programming classes at most universities.

Am I unique in not romanticizing computer science? I see it more as a trade. There can certainly be some beauty to it. I’m sure coal miners hold some of their own in special regard too.

It sounds like you are thinking of software engineering, which is an adjacent field often conflated. CS is about pushing current boundaries and inventing the future.

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

#239

Post by wardedVibe »

bjourne wrote: post #147
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…

I had a guitar tutor once and I asked him if I honestly had a chance to get into the Royal College of Music. He said absolutely, no problem, as long as you practice for at least two hours per day. Every day. For the next ten years... High-level CS is the same and I don't see any reason why it should be different. There is just no, or very little, time to teach introductory programming classes at most universities.

I didn't start programming until I was in college and did just fine in my undergrad CS at UW Madison.

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

#240

Post by mindcrime »

A thought occurred to me when I read this bit. Two thoughts, actually. But they're related.

We’ve also shared this class beyond MIT in the hopes that others may benefit from these resources.

Thought one: they should make this an official OCW thing

Thought two: OCW class resources should be a two way street, like open source development, not just a "throw it over the wall" model.

Not that I'm criticizing MIT for making any content freely available, mind you. Any free, high quality, educational content makes the world an overall better place IMO. No, it's just that I saw this bit:

Editors (Vim)

and couldn't help but think "Great, but what about Emacs?" Which got me thinking something like "Well, why couldn't I, or somebody else (preferably somebody actually qualified) create a corresponding 'Editors (Emacs)' section and contribute it back?"

I dunno, maybe it's a nutty idea. And certainly for the stuff that is released by OCW under corresponding open licenses, I suppose one could "fork" the class somewhere else and run it on a model where outside contributions are accepted. Anyway, this just got me thinking about this concept.

EDIT: never mind, I actually just noticed that this particular course actually is on Github[1], and they do accept pull requests! Very cool.

Would still be cool to see that approach become even more widespread for OCW courses (both from MIT and elsewhere).

[1]: https://github.com/missing-semester/missing-semester/pulls

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