That's actually brilliant! Most of my classes only taught what tools were needed to accomplish coursework, not generally useful tools. Even our OS class focused on the workings of the kernel, not the Unix philosophy and how it influenced what tools were included, and how to use them. Then again, 20 years ago the year of the linux desktop was much farther away than it is today...
The Missing Semester of Your CS Education – Revised for 2026
81–90 of 139 posts
Re: The Missing Semester of Your CS Education – Revised for 2026
#82I didn't even have to look to know that they'd added a section on AI sloperators.
Want my feedback? Delete the AI bullshit and go back to teaching programmers how to learn and understand what they are building.
Re: The Missing Semester of Your CS Education – Revised for 2026
#83In terms of shell, I moved to the fish shell 5 years ago. Things are so much easier. No need to a massive amount of plugins and configs, mostly works out of the box.
xonsh user for 8 years here :-)
I agree that these shells are better than bash, etc. But some bash knowledge is probably a must, given its ubiquity. You're not always going to have the option to install fish.
(Sadly, most of my jobs, including my current one, require tcsh).
Re: The Missing Semester of Your CS Education – Revised for 2026
#84When I was a Physics Ph.D. student in NYU in the late nineties, I took a course called UNIX tools in the CS department. It was a hands on course where the instructor did live REPL in the terminal and we watched him showing us all the tricks. I got hooked with UNIX since then. Got myself a dialup terminal in my tiny apartment in east village and dial in to the workstation on campus. The latency is so bad that I can’t only see the feedback after a few keystrokes. That was when I trained my vi muscle memory. (EMacs was out of the question.)
Later I got my own IBM 386 and installed Linux on it and started to program in Perl …
I am a big fan of Jon’s YouTube videos on Rust and I started to use Rust in non conventional ways.
I am going to follow this lecture series and “port” them to rustdoc and see how it goes.
Another rabbit hole to fall down, it is going to be fun.
Re: The Missing Semester of Your CS Education – Revised for 2026
#85Great to see a chapter on version control. It is such a shame that almost no CS program teaches proper version control. VCSs and the commit history can be such a tremendously valuable tool when used correctly. git bisect/blame/revert/rebase/… become so much less useful when VC is treated as a chore and afterthought, and basically amounts to: “Feature is done, my work is complete, just do `git commit -am "changes"` an…
This might be a good time to teach jujitsu, before they're too invested in git.
Re: The Missing Semester of Your CS Education – Revised for 2026
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
Right on. Git is good at what it does, but its CLI is too low-level. It feels more like an assembly language than an end-user language, and a haphazard one at that. There are wrappers that make it much more approachable. IntelliJ’s Git frontend, for example, is pretty nice.
Git is a cli software. If you find yourself repeating a set of commands, what you should do is abstract it using an alias or a script. And you will have you own nice interface.
That's a cop out. Not every CLI sucks so bad it needs a wrapper.
Re: The Missing Semester of Your CS Education – Revised for 2026
#87Huge blindspot, especially with all the AI coding going on now... Testing
Re: The Missing Semester of Your CS Education – Revised for 2026
#88Purdue CompE has long had a 1 credit hour course that is just this. Lots of bash and git and then a little Python and Tkinter at the end. Other courses them assumed we had this knowledge - the 300-level ASIC class had us submit assignments by pushing to a remote, for instance. Definitely one of the most useful credit hours I had.
Re: The Missing Semester of Your CS Education – Revised for 2026
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
> If most people are not using a tool properly, it is not their fault; it is the tool's fault. This is a standard that we don't apply to most other tools outside of IT. I do think git could be more usable, but most powerful tools have sharp edges and require training. A bandsaw is a fantastic tool, but if you try to use one without reading about it first, you'll end up losing a finger. I'm not sure I'd blame the band…
To put it into your metaphor: I am not advocating against the existence of bandsaws. I would just rather have bandsaws that do not cut off your fingers if you do not read a book about them first and make it difficult to sew the fingers back on, while requiring arcane incantations to do their work. There are of course power tools with obnoxious protections that make them difficult to use, but since we are dealing with…
We did! Mercurial!
Re: The Missing Semester of Your CS Education – Revised for 2026
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
Most people treat higher education as a pass to good paying job and I think it's unrealistic to think otherwise.
> Most people treat higher education as a pass to good paying job and I think it's unrealistic to think otherwise. Yes, and that's a problem. If the advent of coding agents leads to people that are only in it for the money staying away from higher education - good. Those people are the reason why higher education turned to shit anyway and maybe it will be a nice change when people go into higher ed out of curiosity a…
On one hand I agree, since I see way too many dispassionate people working in this profession, on the other hand this requires businesses to understand, that a software developer is more than a code monkey. I am not sure we are heading there. Currently, it seems more like many non-IT people think that their monkey imitations are the same that software developers have been doing for years and that they now don't need any good developers any longer. For some CRUD businesses this might even be true.