CSCI 2170: User Experience of Command Line Tools.
This should exist and the class should study openssl.
Computer science courses that don't exist, but should (2015)
61–70 of 308 posts
Re: Computer science courses that don't exist, but should (2015)
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
Cryptography is all math, networking is largely math and algorithms (IMO yes this should really be replaced with information theory. Just understanding Shannons paper would have been more valuable than learning about how routers work), AI is mostly statistics (And AI as a whole Id argue is the essence of computer science), graphics is largely math and algorithms. Yes I very much think a computer science degree should…
Yeah cryptography mostly (but certainly not all) math but it accounts for a negligible (pun intended) portion of interesting security work. AI is a lot of math, especially if you hang out with the quasiconvex optimization crowd, but a vast majority of work in that field can not properly constitute “theory” I think it’s clear in practice that computer science has officially strayed beyond whatever narrow bounds people…
Alot of its a push for practicality/catering to student's interests. IMO its a result of a really archaic education system. Universities were originally small and meant for theoretical study, not as a de facto path for everyone to enroll into in order to get a job.
If it were me Id get rid of statically defined 4 year programs, and/or definite required courses for degrees, or just degrees in general. Just offer courses and let people come learn what they want.
One of my favorite classes was a python class that focused on building some simple games with tkinter, making a chat client, hosting a server, because it was the first time I understood how actual software worked. Im really glad I took that class.
On the other hand Id love to have learned information theory, lamba calculus, all the early AI, cognitive science, theory of programming languages, philosophy behind all of it that got us here
Re: Computer science courses that don't exist, but should (2015)
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
The history of art or philosophy spans millenia. The effective history of computing spans a lifetime or three. There's no sense comparing the two. In the year 2500 it might make sense to be disappointed that people don't compare current computational practices with things done in 2100 or even 1970, but right now, to call what we have "history" does a disservice to the broad meaning of that term. Another issue: art an…
If Alan Kay doesn't respond directly to this comment, what is Hacker News even for ? :) You're not wrong about history, but that only strengthens Kay's case. E.g., our gazillion-times better physical substrate should have led an array of hotshot devs to write web apps that run circles around GraIL[1] by 2025. (Note the modeless GUI interaction.) Well, guess what? Such a thing definitely doesn't exist. And that can on…
> E.g., our gazillion-times better physical substrate should have led an array of hotshot devs to write web apps that run circles around GraIL[1] by 2025
Why? What problem did it solve that we're suffering from in 2025?
Re: Computer science courses that don't exist, but should (2015)
#64We can take a further step back and say that no one really knows how to do pagination and those who do are sick of it to teach it to others.
Re: Computer science courses that don't exist, but should (2015)
#65Previously:
Computer science courses that don't exist, but should (2015) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16127508 - Jan 2018 (4 comments)
Computer science courses that don't exist, but should (2015) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13424320 - Jan 2017 (1 comment)
Computer science courses that don't exist, but should - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10201611 - Sept 2015 (247 comments)
Re: Computer science courses that don't exist, but should (2015)
#66It is interesting that no software engineering or computer science course I’ve seen has ever spent any time on CI/CD. Jenkins, Docker, Kubernetes, none of these sorts of things - and I don’t even mean these specific technologies, but moreover nothing even in their ballpark.
> It is interesting that no software engineering or computer science course I’ve seen has ever spent any time on CI/CD.
It's hard to fit everything student needs to know in the curriculum. Someone else posted here they had 10 pages of proofs per week, for one course. I would have been fired for assigning so much homework!
I was a CS professor at a local college. My solution was to ignore CS1 and CS2 curriculum (we were not ABET accredited, so that's okay) in the second course of Java programming. Instead, I taught students Maven/Gradle, Git and GitHub, workflows, CI/CD, regular expressions, basic networking, basic design patterns, Spring Boot, and in general everything I thought new programmers ought to know. I even found a book that covered much of this stuff, but in the end I wrote my own learning materials and didn't use a book.
The course was a victim of its success. The school mandated the course for non-Java programmers too, resulting in a lot of push-back from the non-Java students.
If anyone is interested, I have the syllabus online still (I've since retired) at https://wpollock.com/>. Look for COP2800 and COP2805C. I can also send the Java teaching materials as a PDF to anyone interested (book length, but sadly not publishable quality).
Re: Computer science courses that don't exist, but should (2015)
#67The Classical Software Studies would be quite useful. Go write a game in 64kb of RAM in BASIC. It would really stretch your creativity and coding skills.
Ha. You call it "history". I call it "childhood". I did that years before getting to Uni :)
Although, to be fair, while it was a helpful practice at coding, I'm not a game designer, so it was a game too terrible to play.
First year Uni though I spent too many hours in the lab, competing with friends, to recreate arcade games on the PC. Skipping the game design part was helpful. To be fair by then we had a glorious 640k of ram. Some Assembly required.
Re: Computer science courses that don't exist, but should (2015)
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
The history of art or philosophy spans millenia. The effective history of computing spans a lifetime or three. There's no sense comparing the two. In the year 2500 it might make sense to be disappointed that people don't compare current computational practices with things done in 2100 or even 1970, but right now, to call what we have "history" does a disservice to the broad meaning of that term. Another issue: art an…
If Alan Kay doesn't respond directly to this comment, what is Hacker News even for ? :) You're not wrong about history, but that only strengthens Kay's case. E.g., our gazillion-times better physical substrate should have led an array of hotshot devs to write web apps that run circles around GraIL[1] by 2025. (Note the modeless GUI interaction.) Well, guess what? Such a thing definitely doesn't exist. And that can on…
https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=alankay Has not been active on Hacker News for several years now.
At 85 he has earned the peace of staying away from anything and everything on the internet.
Re: Computer science courses that don't exist, but should (2015)
#69> CSCI 3300: Classical Software Studies Alan Kay, my favorite curmudgeon, spent decades trying to remind us we keep reinventing concepts that were worked out in the late 70s and he’s disappointed we’ve been running in circles ever since. He’s still disappointed because very few programmers are ever introduced to the history of computer science in the way that artists study the history of art or philosophers the histo…
The history of art or philosophy spans millenia. The effective history of computing spans a lifetime or three. There's no sense comparing the two. In the year 2500 it might make sense to be disappointed that people don't compare current computational practices with things done in 2100 or even 1970, but right now, to call what we have "history" does a disservice to the broad meaning of that term. Another issue: art an…
> The history of art or philosophy spans millen[n]ia.
And yet for the most part, philosophy and the humanities' seminal development took place within about a generation, viz., Plato and Aristotle.
> Computation has overwhelming dependence on the performance of its physical substrate [...].
Computation theory does not.
Re: Computer science courses that don't exist, but should (2015)
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah cryptography mostly (but certainly not all) math but it accounts for a negligible (pun intended) portion of interesting security work. AI is a lot of math, especially if you hang out with the quasiconvex optimization crowd, but a vast majority of work in that field can not properly constitute “theory” I think it’s clear in practice that computer science has officially strayed beyond whatever narrow bounds people…
Alot of its a push for practicality/catering to student's interests. IMO its a result of a really archaic education system. Universities were originally small and meant for theoretical study, not as a de facto path for everyone to enroll into in order to get a job. If it were me Id get rid of statically defined 4 year programs, and/or definite required courses for degrees, or just degrees in general. Just offer cours…
Your point is well taken and to some extent I agree, but I think you have to recognize. It’s not just student interest, career preparation, and practicality.
The research done by professional academic computer scientists also reflects the broad scope I’m advocating for.