Thank you so much for this post!!
God I wish I had a CS degree, this looks like so much fun! One day, maybe...
Stanford CS Curriculum 2021
31–40 of 146 posts
Re: Stanford CS Curriculum 2021
#32I love how each course has a unique web page. Do the teachers make them themselves? Almost feel like browsing their personal websites and have that sense of exploration going through them.
Re: Stanford CS Curriculum 2021
#33Does anyone know which of these courses are great to learn more about system design?
Not from stanford but I enjoyed these:
MIT 6.824: Distributed Systems https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cQP8WApzIQQ&list=PLrw6a1wE39...
CMU The Databaseology Lectures https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GkgDDs9EJUw&list=PLSE8ODhjZX...
You essentially learn systems by looking at lots and lots of examples of how good real world systems are designed.
Re: Stanford CS Curriculum 2021
#34as a self taught individual I always find it outstanding how much things they are able to pack in a CS degree and how fast people forget all this stuff after graduation. Like how many of your coworkers from top CS schools remember most of the material in their compilers, cryptography, comp bio courses? EDIT: To clarify, I'm not criticizing this approach, I think it's great to expose students to as many subfields as p…
> Like how many of your coworkers from top CS schools remember most of the material in their compilers, cryptography, comp bio courses? Nobody forgets a compilers course. A "compilers" course is probably the first CS course where debugging is real--and terrifyingly hard. A compilers course converts a programmer from a "null pointers are bad" person to a "null pointers are evil " zealot. Compilers courses are probably…
Huh?
I've taken a compilers course, at Stanford no less.
I've written a couple of compilers and some near-compilers. (A very fast simulator can be a lot like a compiler.)
I don't think that null pointers are evil. In fact, I like null pointers.
My beef with null pointers is that very few languages support multiple null pointers. (No, mocked objects or sentinels are NOT a good substitute.)
Yes, I want multiple isNull values that can be distinguished but can't be used. (Python's "lots of things are false and you can create more" is arguably the closest.)
Re: Stanford CS Curriculum 2021
#35Is this a curriculum or a complete list of classes? 88 courses over a 4 year degree sounds a bit heavy.
undergrads takes about 5 classes per quarter, 3 quarters per year, for four year. So 60 classes, but including all the other stuff that is non CS related. So yeah, its a list, not a curriculum.
Re: Stanford CS Curriculum 2021
#36as a self taught individual I always find it outstanding how much things they are able to pack in a CS degree and how fast people forget all this stuff after graduation. Like how many of your coworkers from top CS schools remember most of the material in their compilers, cryptography, comp bio courses? EDIT: To clarify, I'm not criticizing this approach, I think it's great to expose students to as many subfields as p…
The key point isn’t that CS grads need to remember the stuff they learnt. What they need to remember when facing a real life problem is that they had studied about something that was similar to the problem they were solving, and have the ability to look up and easily grok the solution they had studied a decade ago. As someone who is not a CS grad, it’s often difficult to Know where to even start looking for a solutio…
Agreed. I think it’s primarily reference material. I took an Organization of programming languages course once, and even though I don’t use Prolog everyday, I’m able to jump and think about it if I ever have a case where I’m working with Boolean logic. Alternatively, I don’t know much about semaphores in the OS, but when I think about locks, it’s something I can refer to for more ideas. I wouldn’t say it dramatically improves my life, but it’s just random knowledge that I wouldn’t be intimidated by if I stumbled upon it in the real world
Re: Stanford CS Curriculum 2021
#37This is a catalogue, not a curriculum. Students do not take 90 classes, but a selection of these together with classes outside their major.
Re: Stanford CS Curriculum 2021
#38as a self taught individual I always find it outstanding how much things they are able to pack in a CS degree and how fast people forget all this stuff after graduation. Like how many of your coworkers from top CS schools remember most of the material in their compilers, cryptography, comp bio courses? EDIT: To clarify, I'm not criticizing this approach, I think it's great to expose students to as many subfields as p…
The key point isn’t that CS grads need to remember the stuff they learnt. What they need to remember when facing a real life problem is that they had studied about something that was similar to the problem they were solving, and have the ability to look up and easily grok the solution they had studied a decade ago. As someone who is not a CS grad, it’s often difficult to Know where to even start looking for a solutio…
I made an effort of actually trying to retain what I learned, but mostly it just mean that I search just as often though.
However, I see the depth of my knowledge in computing isn't that deep.
I can now define what a computer is without fumbling for a definition.
Re: Stanford CS Curriculum 2021
#39Given the power tech has over the daily experiences of billions and how many questions of values and ethics it is now directly confronting in society, I'm a little surprised there's just one ethics course and one law course that cover these subjects, and they're electives [1].
We all know much of the learning in engineering is on the job anyways, so the role of formal education is less about particular job skills and more about building foundations for understanding - exactly the time and place to teach ethical frameworks and other critical interfaces with society.
Ten years later you may not remember the details, but at least you'll remember there's some kind of ethical framework or lesson that explains why a course of action your boss is considering might not be right or has implications they're not considering. The world needs more of this kind of awareness from CS grads. Not suggesting this be a major part of the curriculum, but just maybe we could go from 0 required courses covering this to 1 or 2.
[1] https://web.stanford.edu/class/cs182/ and https://5harad.com/mse330/ Yes, STS (https://sts.stanford.edu) exists, but again that's elective and thus involves sacrificing opportunities to take those courses.
EDIT- see epoch_100's link here about Stanford CS embedding ethics throughout the curriculum, which seems to address this concern: https://hai.stanford.edu/news/building-ethical-computational...
Re: Stanford CS Curriculum 2021
#40as a self taught individual I always find it outstanding how much things they are able to pack in a CS degree and how fast people forget all this stuff after graduation. Like how many of your coworkers from top CS schools remember most of the material in their compilers, cryptography, comp bio courses? EDIT: To clarify, I'm not criticizing this approach, I think it's great to expose students to as many subfields as p…
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.