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Northeastern's redesign of the CS curriculum

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Re: Northeastern's redesign of the CS curriculum

#181

Post by WorldPeas »

theonething wrote: post #58
mjdiloreto wrote: post #43

The end of an era. This is nothing less than a travesty honestly. The current (now former) curriculum at NEU was uniquely exceptional, and now it will be conformingly adequate. Anyone who complained about the difficulty or lack of "job-market applicability" of the Fundies classes entirely missed the forest for the trees. The point is the design _process_, and using Racket forced this. It also demonstrated the magic t…

Too bad there isn't an online version that anyone can take.

I spoke briefly with Felleisen at the end of this year, and sadly it seems the zoom recordings from the pandemic are lost to time. The course sites will likely stay up but the lectures were where it mattered

Re: Northeastern's redesign of the CS curriculum

#182

Post by WorldPeas »

nonTop5CSmajor wrote: post #132
mjdiloreto wrote: post #43

The end of an era. This is nothing less than a travesty honestly. The current (now former) curriculum at NEU was uniquely exceptional, and now it will be conformingly adequate. Anyone who complained about the difficulty or lack of "job-market applicability" of the Fundies classes entirely missed the forest for the trees. The point is the design _process_, and using Racket forced this. It also demonstrated the magic t…

I'm going to provide a controversial take here as CS grad from a similarly-tiered program: there is a huge chasm between top-4 cs programs and everyone else. The top 4 are obvious: Stanford, MIT, CMU, Berkeley. Then there are the cs programs of the ivy leagues, not as strong, but usually you have a rich parent or uncle who has already speed-tracked you into a hedge fund, so lets put those aside. I didnt go to a top-4…

bad faith doomer. One thing you also forget to mention is that non-us workers are just that, not in the US, and that matters now that more places are putting an emphasis on in-person work.

Re: Northeastern's redesign of the CS curriculum

#183

Post by LikesPwsh »

jart wrote: post #128
pclmulqdq wrote: post #26

I went to Caltech when they were contemplating similar things in the CS curriculum, although the normal curriculum was less radical than Northeastern's seems to be. There is a tension here that is being understated which is that people of every major now take the intro-level CS class because programming is integral to everything. Teaching algorithm design in that class is not particularly useful to a biologist who ju…

Why can't they just take a class on shell scripting? The whole point of computer science is to automate things, because that's what gives you leverage. If you don't care about understanding computer science, at least skip to the point and enjoy the fruits. We've been using the UNIX shell for 50 years. It's not going anywhere.

Relational databases are going to be around for the next thousand years if you want something useful outside of tech.

Re: Northeastern's redesign of the CS curriculum

#184

Post by WorldPeas »

dickfickling wrote: post #4

I attended Northeastern from 2010-2013. Fundies (the freshman-level functional programming courses) was fundamental (ha) to my growth as a software developer. It taught me how to reason about data and how to design programs (the literal name of the textbook). I know a lot of students hated it—frankly those were mostly the students that it seemed were only doing computer science programs because they’d heard they coul…

I can't find a person who didn't initially make the fun-dies joke, then later come around to it, myself included. Sometimes you don't realize someone helped you until years later.

Re: Northeastern's redesign of the CS curriculum

#185

Post by naijaboiler »

weitendorf wrote: post #93
geokon wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I once asked a professor about this and the answer I got was interesting. Basically Java and OO and Design Patterns are taught upfront because it turned out this was a huge stumbling block for a lot of people. Bigger than for instance C and pointers. Like it just doesn't click for a lot of people and they end up struggling a lot the rest of the major So it's not that these are the most crucial concepts, but you want…

The first time I tried to learn how to program, I was 12-13 years old and found some video from a university that started by covering Classes, Methods, and Objects. I watched one or two lectures and it made no sense to me, so I gave up. I had no idea WTF "objects are like nouns and methods are like verbs" was trying to teach me. I just wanted to make my computer do things. Around 14-15 I started playing around with m…

Brilliant. And correct. The people who created this concepts landed there after going through similar paths like you did (i.e. they started somewhere straightforward but eventually invented these complexities out of necessity.) They understand they "why" behind it.

But somehow, in the curriculum, we expect complete noobs to just get this abstract, non-relatable concepts without any contexts.

Re: Northeastern's redesign of the CS curriculum

#186

Post by naijaboiler »

andrewstuart wrote: post #107
tptacek wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree? The point of a CS degree isn't to prepare you for the 20 years of stale J2EE code your first job is going to throw at you, and object-oriented design is pretty out of fashion.

>> and object-oriented design is pretty out of fashion OO isn't debunked and its not out of fashion. All that's happened is that it's no longer gospel that "the only way to program is OO". I write code that has all sorts of styles and approaches that fit the task at hand and sometimes the right tool for the job is OO. I get the sense you're saying that OO has been proven to be hokum and no one should learn it or do i…

how did it ever become gospel. given the diversity of human experiences, and the the diversity of problems we have to tackle, it is near impossible for there to be one and only way to solve a problem.

Re: Northeastern's redesign of the CS curriculum

#187

Post by naijaboiler »

randcraw wrote: post #163

If this strategy infects CS degree curriculums widely, employers looking for more than mere coders will overlook CS majors and instead look to engineers, which is where most computing professionals came from academically before about 1980. Engineering continues to demand that students learn principles grounded in theory (calculus and statistics and discrete math), rigorous analysis (pattern recognition and learning),…

I find myself agreeing. As a person with an engineering background that's part of an ownership team, I often find myself longing for software developers with an engineering mindset i.e think of how the components will fit, without breaking user experience.

Re: Northeastern's redesign of the CS curriculum

#188

Post by jart »

antasvara wrote: post #177
jart wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I put gnuplot code and python code in my shell scripts all the time. Someone like you should think of it as a jupyter notebook that doesn't need a web browser.

I'm someone that uses shell scripts in my day to day work (I don't work in biology any more, but did for a while). I'm saying that for the average scientist using these tools, a shell script is not an easier or more useful tool than Python plus libraries. Can you honestly say that shell scripts are more intuitive and easy to understand than Jupyter notebooks? Are they going to be more easy to transfer to other stakeh…

I can't think of a faster easier tool for composing and controlling a bunch of heterogeneous things. Even if you write a Python script that does it, you're still using shell to run it. Notebooks are good for experimenting and explaining, not for automating.

Re: Northeastern's redesign of the CS curriculum

#189

Post by ventDiagram »

nonTop5CSmajor wrote: post #161
kcb wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Many cs grads go into bs jobs way under their potential (random government agencies, contractors.) Why are those jobs deemed bs?

>>> Many cs grads go into bs jobs way under their potential (random government agencies, contractors.) > Why are those jobs deemed bs? Because many of us went into the field bright-eyed, thinking about working on cool products, designing the latest algorithms, or being part of world-renowned teams. NOT to run the nightly batch job for the Massachusetts Depart of Family Services wage garnishment system. NOT to fix bug…

First world problems.

Guess the smarties should have measured the patterns physical social reality rather than get sucked in by propaganda.

What physics demands society align with the spoken philosophy of a people? It’s kind of on the people to demand politics align with the philosophy. But go on, people; scream at your screen like gramps did at Dan Rather.

Distribution of education does not guarantee distribution of intelligence.

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