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Stanford CS Curriculum 2021

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Re: Stanford CS Curriculum 2021

#121

Post by beckingz »

kiba wrote: post #40
kamaal wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Brain was designed to process information(mostly), not to store mass quantities of information. I mean it's more like a RAM/Cache than Amazon Glacier. If you don't put knowledge into practice it all goes quickly.

We can store massive quantities of information if we bother to hack our brain/learning process.

Yes, but it has to be maintained.

The issue is that we have no incentive to remember information that is 'useless'. So the brain, being efficient, forgets it.

Re: Stanford CS Curriculum 2021

#123

Post by jjice »

> Practical Unix

I hope this is a required course. I wish it was a freshman year course for me. I had to pick Unix up on my own (and fell in love while doing so), but a lot of my classmates didn't, and it made group work in the future a bit of a pain. Not that it is there fault, but it would have been nice to lay down an OS framework for students instead of focusing solely on writing algorithms and leaving what SSH is to mystery for a lot of students.

Re: Stanford CS Curriculum 2021

#124

Post by z5h »

Why OO? Why C++ so early in the curriculum? These seem like very specific/opinionated tools. I got a degree in math without ever taking a “HP 48GX” course.

Re: Stanford CS Curriculum 2021

#125

Post by blacktriangle »

cauthon wrote: post #64
rawtxapp wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FWIW, I've never seen any value whatsoever in these ethics classes (note: I'm not saying it's not an important topic, it's extremely important). The hypotheticals and situations presented and discussed in many of them are very similar to yearly mandatory classes we have to take at FAANG (and many other workplaces I assume) and it boils down to having a checkbox that says "I'm not stupid". Real world ethics is much mo…

Sounds like you just haven’t taken a good ethics class. I was required to take one in grad school (comp bio/biost at) taught by a law professor. Every week we were assigned a case study on a real-world ethics problem, such as the Duke/Potti scandal [1]. We wrote up answers to 5-6 discussion questions ahead of class, then spent the class time in small group discussion rather than lecture. I think it was one of the mos…

I think you're right the problem is the course. For example I also had a great ethics class, but it was bioethics, not technology.

Part of the problem is you think that software engineers should take a course in software engineering ethics. The problem here is like the GP says, it boils down into a class of are you dumb enough to pick the obviously unethical answer and fails to teach any ethics.

I wonder if requiring an ethics class that focuses on an orthogonal topic, for example requiring software engineers to take a course in business ethics, might be more effective since they can focus more on the actual system process of ethics and less on how it effects their own personal career, and thus be more willing to honestly evaluate ethically grey scenarios.

Re: Stanford CS Curriculum 2021

#126

Post by zozbot234 »

z5h wrote: post #124

Why OO? Why C++ so early in the curriculum? These seem like very specific/opinionated tools. I got a degree in math without ever taking a “HP 48GX” course.

There's a history of teaching C++ to novice programmers, with some success. It even used to be a language of choice for AP intro-to-programming classes. Teaching Swift or Rust would be far more opinionated. As for OO, while old-fashioned it's something that new grads should at least know about, and it can still be useful if you avoid the big footgun - namely, implementation inheritance.

Re: Stanford CS Curriculum 2021

#127

Post by tsss »

Looks like something you'd find at some no-name technical college in Germany and not a top university. Where's the linear algebra, multivariate calculus, real analysis, differential equations, graph theory, abstract algebra, numerical mathematics, stochastics, etc.? Those are all required courses in my degree with additional options in complex analysis, functional analysis, topology, measure theory and so on. How are they planning to do those robotics or machine learning classes without the mathematical prerequisites in linear algebra, differential equations and optimization? It looks more like a vocational training program to me. No self-respecting university here would offer courses on "mobile development" or "web development". Even for analysis of algorithms you need basic calculus which apparently isn't part of the high school curriculum in the US (although we can assume that everyone who makes it to Stanford would've taken AP classes).

Re: Stanford CS Curriculum 2021

#128

Post by xondono »

Mordisquitos wrote: post #110
zozbot234 wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That looks like a CompEng degree, something of a mix of CS and EE content. The physics and digital circuits courses don't seem very typical of pure CS degrees.

In Spain for example, there is historically no such thing as a Computer Science degree. Before the implementation of the EU-wide Bologna Process (mid 2000s), 5-year bachelor degrees were classified into either ordinary “Licenciaturas“ or “Ingenierías“ (=Engineering), with computing being an engineering degree ( “Ingeniería Informática“ ) and treated as such. I'm not sure how it works now, but I think it's still a deg…

As someone who suffered it, it was way worse.

There was “ingeniería informatica”, which was kind of CS, but focused highly on software (databases were a significant part of the curriculum).

Then there was “licenciatura informatica”, although it was rarer to find and a lot of colleges woudn’t offer it. It should be the CS equivalent, but it was generally seen as very heavily related to math, and computation was seen in “general terms”. There were 2 or 3 programming courses at best, with most of the curriculum being similar to pure maths degrees.

Then, if you wanted to focus on hardware (like I did), your best path was “ingenieria de telecomunicaciones” (telecom engineering?) and then do a 2 year “superior engineering in electronics” (which just meant you need a previous engineering to acces).

Nowadays the scheme is similar, but instead of 3 and 5 year plans, they’re 4 or 5.

Re: Stanford CS Curriculum 2021

#129

Post by tsss »

dan-robertson wrote: post #104
speters wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't get why it would include so much math but no discrete or proof based stuff. Was it a degree in computer engineering instead?

I suspect it is a distinction in the common names of things. Eg to me “logic, Boolean algebra” feels like something that ought to fit into a lecture or two (assuming here that logic doesn’t mean formal logic full of things like tautologies and modus ponens and some ZF set theory). So I have to assume that there’s more to it. Another example is that in my education I think of analysis as being the “pure” thing with a…

US colleges often don't even do that. They just learn differentiation and integration rules but none of the actual math, hence why it's called "calculus" and not "real analysis" which the math majors take.

Re: Stanford CS Curriculum 2021

#130

Post by z5h »

zozbot234 wrote: post #126
z5h wrote: post #124

Why OO? Why C++ so early in the curriculum? These seem like very specific/opinionated tools. I got a degree in math without ever taking a “HP 48GX” course.

There's a history of teaching C++ to novice programmers, with some success. It even used to be a language of choice for AP intro-to-programming classes. Teaching Swift or Rust would be far more opinionated. As for OO, while old-fashioned it's something that new grads should at least know about, and it can still be useful if you avoid the big footgun - namely, implementation inheritance.

That's fair about the history of teaching C++. If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
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