[HN Gopher] The Missing Semester of Your CS Education
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The Missing Semester of Your CS Education
Author : anishathalye
Score : 88 points
Date : 2020-02-03 17:25 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (missing.csail.mit.edu)
(TXT) w3m dump (missing.csail.mit.edu)
| lkbm wrote:
| In the lab for my second or third CS course, the professor was
| walking us through intro Unix usage, but he didn't take
| attendance so it ended up being just 2-4 of us showing up. After
| a few weeks, he cancelled the lectures and told us he'd just be
| around to answer questions, help with homework, etc.
|
| The last lecture before he cancelled things was an intro to Vim.
| The next would've been Emacs.
|
| And that's the story of how I became a life-long Vim user. :-)
| trillic wrote:
| Here's a link to a similar course offered by UMich EECS. I really
| enjoyed it when I took it as an undergrad.
|
| https://github.com/c4cs/c4cs.github.io
| dahfizz wrote:
| I really wish this practical stuff was more emphasized. I
| graduated with a lot of very smart people who could write great
| code - but they could not compile, run, test, or check it into
| VCS to save their lives.
|
| It made group projects hell.
| wes1350 wrote:
| This course is wonderful! I've read through all the material and
| watched all the lectures and I can say it has helped me
| tremendously thus far. I'm still trying to master all the tools
| they've mentioned but I already feel much more proficient with
| e.g. version control, vim, using the command line, etc. If you're
| an experienced dev then you might already know all of these
| things, but if you feel that you have some gaps in your knowledge
| with some of these tools, this course will likely point you in
| the right direction.
| floatrock wrote:
| If you're an experienced dev, you use all these every single
| day.
|
| God save me if I'm asked to implement quicksort though...
| theory is nice, but for me, academia largely forgot about this
| practical stuff.
| Jonhoo wrote:
| 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 the down arrow key for
| 30 seconds to scroll to the bottom of a large file in Vim, or
| using the nuclear approach to fix a Git repository
| (https://xkcd.com/1597/).
|
| At least at MIT, these topics are not taught as part of the
| university curriculum: students are never shown how to use these
| tools, or at least not how to use them efficiently, and thus
| waste time and effort on tasks that should be simple. The
| standard CS curriculum is missing critical topics about the
| computing ecosystem that could make students' lives significantly
| easier.
|
| To help mitigate this, we ran a short lecture series during MIT's
| Independent Activities Period (IAP) that covered all the topics
| we consider crucial to be an effective computer scientist and
| programmer. We've published lecture notes and videos in the hopes
| that people outside MIT find these resources useful.
|
| To offer a bit of historical perspective on the class: we taught
| this class for the first time last year, when we called it
| "Hacker Tools" (there was some great discussion about last year's
| class here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19078281). We
| found the feedback from here and elsewhere incredibly helpful.
| Taking that into account, we changed the lecture topics a bit,
| spent more lecture time on some of the core topics, wrote better
| exercises, and recorded high-quality lecture videos using a fancy
| lecture capture system (and this hacky DSL for editing multi-
| track lecture videos, which we thought some of you would find
| amusing: https://github.com/missing-semester/videos).
|
| We'd love to hear any insights or feedback you may have, so that
| we can run an even better class next year!
|
| -- Anish, Jose, and Jon
| floatrock wrote:
| Love this. I remember it wasn't until junior year when I was
| reading about the theoretical underpinnings of the unix kernel
| that I learned what the pipe operator I'd been copy-pasting on
| psets really did. I mean, it's great to learn those
| underpinnings, but most course 6 classes assumed you already
| knew all these tools... if it wasn't theory, it wasn't their
| responsibility to teach it.
|
| "Missing Semester" describes it perfectly. Wish there had been
| something like this back in my day... I remember I felt as if I
| had learned all the theory behind fluid mechanics but didn't
| know the first thing about fixing a leaky faucet in my kitchen.
| Keep up the good work!
| ericd wrote:
| Ha some MIT alum friends and I were just talking about how
| great it would be if something like this existed, rather than
| having it be left to one's first years as a junior engineer in
| a company. Thanks for doing this, it's sorely needed.
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