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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

#191

Post by pattisapu »

geofft wrote: post #188
fao_ wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wasn't it Sussman and Ableson that said that Computer Science is both not a science, and not about computers?

Yes, and MIT (correctly) dropped Sussman and Abelson's head-in-the-clouds intro class in favor of a practical one that actually teaches you about computers. I took Abelson and Sussman's class myself, as an MIT undergrad, just before it was phased out. I got a lot out of it, because I had already been using UNIX and writing code for years at home as a teenager. If you didn't have that background it would be useless to…

Your comment reminds a bit of Umberto Eco's How to Write a Thesis. He gets down into details of using colored pens and index cards. Craft.

https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/umberto-eco-how-to-write-...

Re: The Missing Semester of Your CS Education

#192

Post by godshatter »

slumdev wrote: post #129
Jonhoo wrote: post #2

Over the years, we (@anishathalye, @jjgo, @jonhoo) have helped teach several classes at MIT, and over and over we have seen that many students have limited knowledge of the tools available to them. Computers were built to automate manual tasks, yet students often perform repetitive tasks by hand or fail to take full advantage of powerful tools such as version control and text editors. Common examples include holding…

You use Vim in your example. Get your students out of it and into something like IntelliJ IDEA or VS Code or (at a bare minimum) Eclipse.

I personally can't stand IDEs, and use them as sparingly as I can get away with. I don't want the build process abstracted away from me, I want to know exactly what it's doing. Whenever I'm trying to figure something out in an IDE to fix a problem with why something didn't build correctly, I want to throw up my hands and go back to a simple text editor and the make command or some bash scripts. I dislike programs that try to anticipate me, or that fix things after I've typed them. And the part of me that grew up learning to program with 4K of memory available cries when I see how many resources are being used by it.

There are a lot of things I like about them from an editing standpoint, though. Nice for refactoring, easy to find out what arguments a function takes, easy to jump around between files. Vim with multiple buffers isn't too far behind this, though, and it doesn't bring my system to it's knees just opening it up.

I guess I'm getting old.

Re: The Missing Semester of Your CS Education

#193

Post by magduf »

marcosdumay wrote: post #168
fuzzy2 wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s cool. Now, on to my possibly unpopular opinion: This isn’t what computer science is about. In fact, you don’t even need to use a computer to do computer science. Sure, some stuff you learn in CS can make you a better software engineer. CS cannot make you a software engineer. CS can definitely not make you adept at using computers and neither should it. That’s something earlier education institutions must tackl…

Astronomers do stop to study how to build telescopes, chemists do stop to study how to create glassware, and biologists do stop to study culture media. Why do you expect CS students to thrive without learning how to use a computer?

It's only with CS where I see this crazy attitude that you don't need to know anything about the tools of implementation and experimentation in order to pursue a science.

Imagine someone trying to pursue a career in particle physics without knowing anything about how a modern particle collider works. Or someone trying to be an astronomer without knowing anything about how real telescopes work. And at least in those professions, the tools are so huge and expensive and complicated that those scientists really do need an army of technicians and operators to help them gather data or perform experiments; with computers, this just isn't the case: anyone with at least one hand can write a program on a personal computer to test their theory, so the feedback loop should be much, much shorter.

Re: The Missing Semester of Your CS Education

#194

Post by arendtio »

foobarian wrote: post #56
Jonhoo wrote: post #2

Over the years, we (@anishathalye, @jjgo, @jonhoo) have helped teach several classes at MIT, and over and over we have seen that many students have limited knowledge of the tools available to them. Computers were built to automate manual tasks, yet students often perform repetitive tasks by hand or fail to take full advantage of powerful tools such as version control and text editors. Common examples include holding…

Since you mention scrolling using key repeat - it truly is painful to watch someone do it on default settings. And there are usually better ways to do that sort of thing. But sometimes, there is no substitute: going to the right spot in the middle of a word/line, moving around a page, browser title bars, etc. Here's the kicker though: most keyboard repeat rate settings around have a maximum that is pretty much unusab…

Well, I think the point was a different one... more like press G

Re: The Missing Semester of Your CS Education

#195

Post by swiley »

whatshisface wrote: post #152
swiley wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They should be writing them in asciidoc (or even markdown) and using style sheets if they really need complex formatting!!! (although at least latex is decent at typesetting and has nice defaults.)

Does asciidoc have equation typesetting support? I don't really care what I use to write my words, everything is equally good (except for LaTeX which is abnormally good at typesetting), but I care a lot about the user experience for equations, which varies widely between programs.

I always use LaTeX style equations although I think it supports MathML if you want a WYSIWYG. The LaTeX math is the main argument for it, mathtype is kind of miserable.

The reasons I prefer asciidoc to straight LaTeX are:

1) the formatting is completely seperated from the text

2) you’re insulated from the specific rendering engine (you can use PDFLaTeX or WebKit+MathJax etc.) while still getting decent equation syntax and BibTeX.

Re: The Missing Semester of Your CS Education

#196

Post by type0 »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #177
fuzzy2 wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s cool. Now, on to my possibly unpopular opinion: This isn’t what computer science is about. In fact, you don’t even need to use a computer to do computer science. Sure, some stuff you learn in CS can make you a better software engineer. CS cannot make you a software engineer. CS can definitely not make you adept at using computers and neither should it. That’s something earlier education institutions must tackl…

It's not computer science. It is computer literacy. Most people who come out of a CS course will go on to become developers, not academics. The course topics are standard domain knowledge for anyone who builds software - not because of specific tools, but because of the concept that scripting and automation tools exist to make development easier. There is no sense in which being aware of these topics will make you le…

Also it's good to get both academics and developers to use similar tools to ease collaboration.

Re: The Missing Semester of Your CS Education

#197

Post by type0 »

nkrisc wrote: post #125
onei wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I call it a lack of curiosity instead of a lack of imagination. Both are useful, but to me imagination is more about coming up with new solutions than understanding how something that already exists can be bent to your will.

I think they go hand-in-hand. You have to have some imagination about how something must work (however off-base) to be curious enough to find out how it really works. It often seems to me that people who aren't curious lack it because they can't even imagine something different than what is in front of them. They don't wonder how a car works because they can't even begin to deduce how it might work, from the observab…

> I see curiosity and imagination as two sides of the same personality trait expressed in different ways.

That's because the world of today is both complex and complicated. Imagination is needed to decipher things and curiosity to get you the urge to find out more. I would argue that it's two different traits both selected by evolution. Let's imagine a tribe on savannah where some are smart enough to imagine lions hiding behind a hill and not sufficiently curious to find out by just going there, it's great to imagine throwing rocks to scare potential predators away. So you need both, they're complementary and might not even have to be expressed in the same individual but beneficial if they do.

Re: The Missing Semester of Your CS Education

#198

Post by Night_Thastus »

fuzzy2 wrote: post #124
Jonhoo wrote: post #2

Over the years, we (@anishathalye, @jjgo, @jonhoo) have helped teach several classes at MIT, and over and over we have seen that many students have limited knowledge of the tools available to them. Computers were built to automate manual tasks, yet students often perform repetitive tasks by hand or fail to take full advantage of powerful tools such as version control and text editors. Common examples include holding…

That’s cool. Now, on to my possibly unpopular opinion: This isn’t what computer science is about. In fact, you don’t even need to use a computer to do computer science. Sure, some stuff you learn in CS can make you a better software engineer. CS cannot make you a software engineer. CS can definitely not make you adept at using computers and neither should it. That’s something earlier education institutions must tackl…

The college I went to attempted to balance these - covering both abstract concepts and concrete tools and practical skills in roughly equal measure.

I think that's fair. Some people will go on to use both to work as a programmer, some may focus much more heavily on the theory end to focus on the science part of CS.

MS Office definitely doesn't seem to have a place. Maybe for a general "computer competency" course for college students, but not as part of a CS program.

Re: The Missing Semester of Your CS Education

#199

Post by lunias »

fuzzy2 wrote: post #124
Jonhoo wrote: post #2

Over the years, we (@anishathalye, @jjgo, @jonhoo) have helped teach several classes at MIT, and over and over we have seen that many students have limited knowledge of the tools available to them. Computers were built to automate manual tasks, yet students often perform repetitive tasks by hand or fail to take full advantage of powerful tools such as version control and text editors. Common examples include holding…

That’s cool. Now, on to my possibly unpopular opinion: This isn’t what computer science is about. In fact, you don’t even need to use a computer to do computer science. Sure, some stuff you learn in CS can make you a better software engineer. CS cannot make you a software engineer. CS can definitely not make you adept at using computers and neither should it. That’s something earlier education institutions must tackl…

I think that's reasonable. I really wish they offered more applicable classes at lower levels of education... I did like 2 days of programmable Legos in 5th(?) grade and then had to take a basic typing / MS Office course in 9th grade (required like you). In 11th grade I took CISCO Networking, Computer Manufacturing, and an intro programming course in C++.

After high school, I did a 4 year degree in Computer Science and while I learned a lot about algorithms, proofs, FSMs, design-patterns, etc. We got very little practical experience building software.

It'd be nice if they covered version control, more *nix and text editors, extending an existing codebase, refactoring, debugging, APIs, common libraries, multiple languages, and the web in general.

I think most CS students learn to become software engineers either on the job or on their own and there's room for school to help ease that transition.

Re: The Missing Semester of Your CS Education

#200

Post by angry_octet »

fuzzy2 wrote: post #124
Jonhoo wrote: post #2

Over the years, we (@anishathalye, @jjgo, @jonhoo) have helped teach several classes at MIT, and over and over we have seen that many students have limited knowledge of the tools available to them. Computers were built to automate manual tasks, yet students often perform repetitive tasks by hand or fail to take full advantage of powerful tools such as version control and text editors. Common examples include holding…

That’s cool. Now, on to my possibly unpopular opinion: This isn’t what computer science is about. In fact, you don’t even need to use a computer to do computer science. Sure, some stuff you learn in CS can make you a better software engineer. CS cannot make you a software engineer. CS can definitely not make you adept at using computers and neither should it. That’s something earlier education institutions must tackl…

While theoretical computer science doesn't need to use computers for many problems, and the experts do not need to be extremely proficient, that does not mean that a general BSc program should not teach fundamental computer architecture and programming skills -- indeed, it would be irresponsible of them not to.

The other aspect is that CS can be experimental -- the experiments are computational ones. Large computing systems are analysed using the standard techniques of experimental science, and that needs good bench skills -- except the bench is being able to program, reason about programs, etc.

However, does a BSc program need to teach large scale software development, topics like version control and tools like git, CI, etc? No. They are more properly in a BE(Software) course or its equivalent.

Should universities teach Flash/Javascript/Python/C#/nginx/Active Directory as an end in itself? No. That is almost a technical trade qualification.

But you should be able to leave university, learn language X, program in it efficiently, and know how to learn about some system.

(I'm sorry you had to learn about Office.)

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