The Missing Semester of Your CS Education (2020)

We don't expect med students to have spent their teenage years doing experimental surgeries on their friends. Or accounting students to have taught themselves by doing accounting for a major business in their after-school time. Nor do we expect a microbiology student to have spent their childhood experimenting with infectious viruses and bacteria in their garage.

I think we expect that in comp sci just because many of us did happen to grow up doing that. But it's a weird and unusual expectation, and probably not a good one.

It also certainly wouldn't have been expected a few decades ago. You just wouldn't assume that a kid had a mainframe in their house to have learned on. Now that PCs have been around for awhile, we make that assumption, but again I don't think it's a good assumption. Certainly not for the less-affluent, nor the younger ones who grew up with smartphones and tablets instead of a PC.

I think there's also a bit of disconnect in what the purpose of the major is. Actually having a separate 'Software Engineering' major is relatively quite new and generally, Comp Sci was what everybody took if they wanted to learn to work on software. But now some people think it's a totally academic thing, while others think it's industry training, and that always confuses the discussion. But even in spite of that, it's just a bad assumption/expectation.

Thanks for calling this out. I belive Knuth remarked that Dijkstra himself didn’t program the way he thougth CS students should.

If MIT students are really so smart then they can probably learn what to learn on their own. If they can't, then they aren't so smart.

Not a humblebrag. I’ve noticed I struggle with tracking lots of variables and states compared to many fellow developers. I’ve sort of tried to turn this weakness into a strength, by making code simpler, but sometimes I make it too terse because I like code golfing.

>a) remove existing material to make space for it, or b) extend the degree one more semester.

It's not literally an entire semester's worth of material. "The Missing Semester" is just a catchy name they gave it.

The site says:

>The class consists of 11 1-hour lectures, each one centering on a particular topic. The lectures are largely independent, though as the semester goes on we will presume that you are familiar with the content from the earlier lectures. We have lecture notes online, but there will be a lot of content covered in class (e.g. in the form of demos) that may not be in the notes. We will be recording lectures and posting the recordings online.

And in that paragraph the word "semester" it doesn't mean a normal full-length semester:

>The class is being run during MIT’s “Independent Activities Period” in January 2020 — a one-month semester that features shorter student-run classes.

So, 11 lectures over the course of a month (actually three weeks if you look at the listed dates). And it's an unofficial class taught by grad students, alongside other classes.

If a CS program made this official, it could fit into the first two weeks of the course. And that'd be a great thing, since these tools make you way more productive in everything computer-sciency you do. It's like compound interest: the earlier you get good at the shell, the bigger the returns.

I think they call it the "Missing Semester" because

a) it's as useful as an entire semester

b) when you don't already know this stuff, it seems much bigger and more difficult than it really is. and your fellow students who already do know it seem like they're a semester ahead of you in comparison.

c) it might take you a semester to learn the material if you don't have instruction, feedback, a roadmap, while you're juggling your other academic obligations. people remember the things they succeeded in teaching themselves but forget the immense wasted time of rabbit holes they went down because they didn't have a mentor to guide them.

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I didn't study CS, I studied Physics instead. My hands-down favourite course, the one whose material I still use even though my day job has nothing to do with physics, was called something like "Problem Solving for Physicists" (google "university of sheffield PHY340", you can find PDFs of past exam papers to see what I'm talking about). It was this lovely hodge-podge of material, much of which had nothing specifically to do with physics at all. It had stuff like dimensional analysis, how to come up with sensible approximations and Fermi estimates, how to sanity check your calculations, coming up with lower and upper bounds, how to rule out certain classes of solutions even when you can't find the exact answer, that kind of thing. It was in the second or third year of my course, I forget which, but either way nothing in it had more than high-school level mathematics, so it could have been taught in the very first part of the first year, before we even did mechanics 101. That would have been tremendously helpful for everything that came afterwards. That was my "Missing Semester" (or perhaps, "Misplaced Semester").