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The Missing Semester of Your CS Education – Revised for 2026

missing.csail.mit.edu

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Re: The Missing Semester of Your CS Education – Revised for 2026

#101

Post by srpablo »

oytis wrote: post #24
wiseowise wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most “cs” students don’t work in aviation, majority (statistically) work on yet another SaaS that is a CRUD that has been solved millions of times already.

> majority (statistically) work on yet another SaaS that is a CRUD that has been solved millions of times already. Not necessarily going to be true by the time current first year students graduate, given that solved problems are most exposed to AI acceleration.

I think it's a bit like `rails generate`, where it massively speeds up getting a CRUD webapp 0 to 1, but once you get to GitHub or Shopify size, you need a lot more than that to add a new data model.

AIs are pushing many things forward, but due to training sets and context windows, I think meaningfully adding to actually valuable apps, at least as we currently write them (the kind with many DBs/caches/message queues, services) will take a fair bit longer.

Re: The Missing Semester of Your CS Education – Revised for 2026

#103

Post by dvfjsdhgfv »

As it's hosted on CSAIL, I was somewhat disappointed by the code quality section:

https://missing.csail.mit.edu/2026/code-quality/

Although it's specifically code quality, not software quality, I feel so much is missing. Of course there is no space to explain it in detail, but they could at least list/mention things like complexity, maintainability, modularity etc.

Re: The Missing Semester of Your CS Education – Revised for 2026

#104

Post by tovej »

Throaway1982 wrote: post #72
tovej wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Modern instruments are still difficult to use unless you spend time learning how to. Just like git.

No they're easy to use. They're hard to master. Git is hard to figure out how to even upload to.

Git is much easier to master than the piano. I played piano for years and can only just play two-handed melodies if they aren't well-aligned.

I've read a few blog posts and half a book on git, and I don't remember the last time I had issues with it.

I also don't recall a junior ever having trouble uploading files with git. Unless they're in an interactive rebase, which wouldn't happen your first time trying out git.

Re: The Missing Semester of Your CS Education – Revised for 2026

#105

Post by stronglikedan »

dec0dedab0de wrote: post #96
NoNameHaveI wrote: post #25

I'm glad to see there is a "Beyond the Code" section that discusses comments. Here's what I typically told my students in Intro to Programming" Good comments lend insight into the code. Reading the code itself tells you the what. Comments should explain the why. Comments like "i+=1; /* Increment i */" are of little value. However comments such as "We increment i mid loop so that we can peek ahead at the next value fo…

I prefer comments like "I'm sorry about this, I know it's ugly but I'm in a rush and it's the quickest way to get it working"

As long as there's a "TODO" tag in the comment to easily search for, then I prefer those comments as well.

Re: The Missing Semester of Your CS Education – Revised for 2026

#106

Post by e12e »

0xbadcafebee wrote: post #66

If you want to master the shell (it will save years of your life), follow these guides. I highly recommend reading the entire BASH manual, it will answer every question you'll ever have, or at least give you a hint about it, as well as expose you to all the hidden knowledge (some call it "gotchas") you'll wish you knew later. 101 - Bash for Beginners (https://tldp.org/LDP/Bash-Beginners-Guide/html/) - Bash Tutorial (…

I think looking at some of the documentation for oils (née oil sh) and ysh - as well as [looking at using] these two projects [in place of bash] - is also a good idea today:

https://oils.pub/

Re: The Missing Semester of Your CS Education – Revised for 2026

#108

Post by e12e »

caillou wrote: post #77

In terms of shell, I moved to the fish shell 5 years ago. Things are so much easier. No need to a massive amount of plugins and configs, mostly works out of the box.

Fish is probably a good idea for an interactive shell. Osh/ysh might be a good idea for scripting:

https://oils.pub/

I'm still using bash out of habit, though. My one nod to modern tooling is using fzf for shell history search...

Re: The Missing Semester of Your CS Education – Revised for 2026

#109

Post by ontouchstart »

dvfjsdhgfv wrote: post #103

As it's hosted on CSAIL, I was somewhat disappointed by the code quality section: https://missing.csail.mit.edu/2026/code-quality/ Although it's specifically code quality, not software quality, I feel so much is missing. Of course there is no space to explain it in detail, but they could at least list/mention things like complexity, maintainability, modularity etc.

I am not at lecture 9 yet. I would love to follow their journey at human pace just like I did 30 years ago.

I do think your point is valid. The trend in the industry is putting emphasis on cosmetic qualities (format, workflow, testing), producing huge amount of metadata that consumes huge amount of human and machine energy for the peace of mind.

Complexity, maintainability, modularity have more to do with thinking about the problems at proper abstraction levels.

It seems we ended up spending more time on tools like writers spending more time on sharpening pencils or playing with fonts than writing something meaningful.

A low quality software can have beautiful code just like a low quality book has beautiful fonts.

Re: The Missing Semester of Your CS Education – Revised for 2026

#110

Post by gglitch »

Throaway1982 wrote: post #72
tovej wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Modern instruments are still difficult to use unless you spend time learning how to. Just like git.

No they're easy to use. They're hard to master. Git is hard to figure out how to even upload to.

I see the point and I wouldn't want to belabor the metaphor, but I really feel like guitar is actually extremely difficult to even get started with. Between the awkward stretching of the fingers, how difficult/painful it is to hold down strings hard enough (and close enough to the fret) to get a clean, clear note, and how hard it is to hold those strings down in such a way that your fingers don't brush against other strings, I'd say guitar is crazy hard to start. I'm saying this as someone who has been playing and enjoying guitar for decades. Beginners have a rough time of it for awhile.
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