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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)

#301

Post by goodcanadian »

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…

LaTeX is also heavily used in Physics.

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

#302

Post by xwolfi »

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…

And in non-English countries, well, knowing English long before uni helps a fuck ton.

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

#305

Post by tyhoff »

racedude wrote: post #219

Purdue also had a CS190 tools course when I was enrolled that was pretty similar, surprisingly the course website is still up! https://courses.cs.purdue.edu/cs19000:fall13:lecture_1 (see lectures in sidebar). This course is actually how I found out about Hacker News!

Hope you liked the course! I was the one who first made and taught the course. To my knowledge, it’s still a required course for all CS freshman and is still taught by students.

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

#306

Post by tyhoff »

animal_spirits wrote: post #26
whateveracct wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

<3 Me and a few others created this course in 2014. Glad you found it useful! I got so much joy out of the content creating the content for the lectures and labs.

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

#307

Post by owenm »

bazoom42 wrote: post #200
bmitc wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's an interesting phenomenon because F# is far easier to learn than C#.

Perhaps if you already know C#, otherwise I doubt it. Of course it depends on ones prior experience, but F# is functional but still requires you to understand OO in order to interact with the framework.

This was me - my first .net language was F# (although I'd dabbled a tiny bit in C#); it was hard to learn the .net standard library as well as trying to learn functional idioms...

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

#308

Post by simplotek »

throwaway675309 wrote: post #253
whynotminot wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Software development is a trade, if all you aspire to be is a WordPress or frontend developer then you don't need a fancy degree, you can just as easily go to a 6 to 8 week code camp for that. Computer science is a pathway for those that want to delve deeper, and that necessitates rigorous fundamentals in applied mathematics and information theory.

> Computer science is a pathway for those that want to delve deeper, and that necessitates rigorous fundamentals in applied mathematics and information theory.

I dare say that one can go through a whole career as a software engineer without spending a single semester learning about algorithms, in the sense that you just start learning about them in a JIT fashion if/when they become an issue, which is rarely.

Some of the O(X) trivia so much sought after in some interviewing circles is even fundamentally wrong when real world aspects such as problem size or CPU architecture come into play.

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

#309

Post by disgruntledphd2 »

icedchai wrote: post #286
kriro wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Back in the 90's, I'd write all my papers in LaTeX, just to avoid using Windows and Word.

I did this in the noughties, and I was a psychologist ;) Some ideas never die I guess.

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

#310

Post by AlchemistCamp »

ghaff wrote: post #138
lordnacho wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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 don’t think that’s quite right. You’re not going to expect someone majoring in French to not have studied any French before college.

It seems completely reasonable to expect someone to be comfortable finding their way around a computer if they’ve chosen to major in computer science.

I’d also expect an entering electrical engineering major has studied more math than just “some secondary school algebra”. They’ve probably already studied some calculus or at the very least are ready to as soon as they start their first semester.

It’s a bit of a red flag to have no foundations in a subject you’ve decided to focus on for the next four years. That said, sufficiently motivated individuals can catch up and overcome their initial lack of preparation.

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