At Odds: Hackers at Harvard
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At Odds: Hackers at Harvard
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Re: At Odds: Hackers at Harvard
#2>I don’t buy that as an excuse for why there aren’t any intensive courses on Ruby on Rails, Node.js, Objective-C, HTML/CSS and JavaScript.
For the same reason why there aren't any intensive courses on Windows, ASP, or GNOME. Because technologies come and go --- nowhere more so than in software --- and those left standing are the ones who grasped the fundamentals of their field, not the ones who blitzed their way through a Node.js hackathon. The former are the innovators, the latter are the guns for hire.
All the things you mention can be hacked in under a week by a motivated student. If your objective is to hack (and that is entirely fine for many purposes), you don't need a traditional college course to do so. In fact, I would argue that is entirely antithetical to the essence of hacking!
If you're a Harvard student, you have an amazing opportunity to learn the truly difficult subjects with some of the best people in the world, the kind of stuff you won't learn in two hours in an online tutorial. Take advantage of that; for everything else there's the internet.
Re: At Odds: Hackers at Harvard
#3Schools like Harvard should have a major (or at least a concentration) in Web Development. Without that, they're missing out on setting up thousands of students for success.
Re: At Odds: Hackers at Harvard
#4"there seems to be some sort of disdain for the inelegant style of cut and paste hacker programming ingrained in the startup community"
Wait, what?
Re: At Odds: Hackers at Harvard
#5"there seems to be some sort of disdain for the inelegant style of cut and paste hacker programming ingrained in the startup community" Wait, what?
I think that the author means is that Harvard places a high value on "perfect code," when "just ship it," is closer to the mantra of the startup community. Goes hand-in-hand with "do things that don't scale," which is another bit that follows the same ideal of "get it out the door."
I don't think that there is any reason to rush in University though. Take time, learn the fundamentals. There is plenty of time to corner cut later.
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Re: At Odds: Hackers at Harvard
#10I have delved into the theoretical side of computer science, learning about lower-level languages such as C, experiencing faint tastes of web programming, and more recently, an introduction to the beauty of recursion in functional programming languages like OCaml... but I know I haven’t experienced that “hacker” oriented style of programming that I was hoping for through Harvard.
You keep using that word, I do not think it means what you think it means.