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The Missing Semester of Your CS Education

missing.csail.mit.edu

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Re: The Missing Semester of Your CS Education

#11

Post by hinkley »

lkbm wrote: post #4

In the lab for my second or third CS course, the professor was walking us through intro Unix usage, but he didn't take attendance so it ended up being just 2-4 of us showing up. After a few weeks, he cancelled the lectures and told us he'd just be around to answer questions, help with homework, etc. The last lecture before he cancelled things was an intro to Vim. The next would've been Emacs. And that's the story of…

When I started at school we all got unix shell accounts mostly for email. Later years got bumped out into multiple machines but for that one year almost all of us were on the same 8 core box (and seriously clamped down quotas)

Within a few weeks, a friend of a friend of a friend had figured out how to pull pranks, and that opened the floodgates. Soon we all knew about man pages, about commands to query utmp and wtmp (to deduce who just did what to you or a friend), grep, file permissions, tty write permissions, quotas, nntp.

The most fun was when someone did something to you without figuring out how to stop it from being done right back to them. Many a kernel was cat'ed to someone else's terminal.

Even today when I'm trying to troubleshoot, half of the stuff I'm using was first used trying to seek revenge on a prankster. Once in a while I wonder if this would be a good way to teach a class on Unix.

Re: The Missing Semester of Your CS Education

#12

Post by sumoboy »

It's sad to see freshman CS students getting thrown into this unknown world of programming with zero understanding of basic programming principle such at simple logic, tools, and even a book. I just witnessed this last semester where the students first class was basically 'intro was a C++'. No books or resources supplied or referenced.

So it even gets better when the instructor implies don't get help from the internet or examples for assignments, in his eyes everything on the internet is bad or wrong. I gathered he basically wanted the students to fail, what a super hero. Glad to see the effort here to help CS students, great job.

Re: The Missing Semester of Your CS Education

#13

Post by leetcrew »

sumoboy wrote: post #12

It's sad to see freshman CS students getting thrown into this unknown world of programming with zero understanding of basic programming principle such at simple logic, tools, and even a book. I just witnessed this last semester where the students first class was basically 'intro was a C++'. No books or resources supplied or referenced. So it even gets better when the instructor implies don't get help from the interne…

it's even worse at the school I graduated from. the intro level course for cs majors is in python, but calculus I is a prereq. so the students who are catching up in math and/or don't quite feel ready for the real intro course have to take the remedial course, which is in c. I was a TA/grader for that course and what a shitshow it was. I don't think the professor ever explained the concept of undefined behavior.

the highlight for me as a grader was the assignment where they first had to define functions outside of main. many of the students didn't understand that you need to actually return values from (non-void) functions. but in a lot of cases, the value they were supposed to return happened to be sitting in $rax, so they would end up producing the correct output. I was never sure what to do in those cases; they lacked the conceptual tools to even understand what they had done wrong.

Re: The Missing Semester of Your CS Education

#14

Post by sf_rob »

dahfizz wrote: post #9

I really wish this practical stuff was more emphasized. I graduated with a lot of very smart people who could write great code - but they could not compile, run, test, or check it into VCS to save their lives. It made group projects hell.

I graduated high in my CS class from a top school, but it turns out that I'm just good at tests/abstract thinking/hacking things together with duct tape. I'm terrible at software engineering, and really glad to see this kind of stuff being emphasized at the university level.

Re: The Missing Semester of Your CS Education

#16

Post by saboot »

This is not only useful for CS people, but to us hard science members. Coding is a mandatory prereq.. which is usually one class on C or C++. Then we're expected to collaborate on a project with hundreds of developers. This is a great resource for those of us who are a bit lost, thank you.

Re: The Missing Semester of Your CS Education

#17

Post by jedberg »

It's funny, when I was in school, I was always told the difference between a good CS school and an ok school was that the good school only taught you theory and left the practical application to the reader. The ok school had courses on tools and language syntax.

It's kind of awesome to see this coming out of MIT.

Re: The Missing Semester of Your CS Education

#19

Post by sombremesa »

jedberg wrote: post #17

It's funny, when I was in school, I was always told the difference between a good CS school and an ok school was that the good school only taught you theory and left the practical application to the reader. The ok school had courses on tools and language syntax. It's kind of awesome to see this coming out of MIT.

The world's best CS school is an internet connection.

Re: The Missing Semester of Your CS Education

#20

Post by jsd1982 »

I think the reason you don't see this kind of course offered is because it is primarily concerning training and not education.

Imagine if your training course 25 years ago focused on the Turbo C IDE and that's all the University offered. You would be amazingly proficient at Turbo C and know all its keyboard shortcuts but that wouldn't be too relevant in today's market.

Keeping such training material up to date with the latest trends is exhausting work and not worth maintaining, especially given how difficult it is to predict what may be the next tool de jure. Contrast this with more timeless educational topics and it starts to be clearer why this sort of thing is explicitly not taught.

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