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That's not the job of a university. A reasonably smart student picks up how to work git in a few evenings with some online tutorial and some open source project

That's not the job of a university. A reasonably smart student picks up how to work git in a few evenings with some online tutorial and some open source project. Or just when doing their homework. In fact, a proper theoretical foundation makes this really easy. Graph theory and algebra will have taught them about DAGs and partial order, which is what git branches are. A crypto class will have taught them about hashes and signatures. Distributed systems class will have taught them about issues with synchronisation. With all that background it doesn't matter whether it's git or whatever system will be en vogue in 10 years. Imagine a student having learnt CVS 20 years ago at university. Completely useless knowledge today. But the same student with the above fundamentals will pick up git in no time. That's what universities are for.

vvanders 6y ago
If you don't actively make the real-world connections to the theory then most students will just memorize the coursework and then forget it later. The number of times I have to walk through why linear memory access matters, how caches and branch predictors work is staggeringly high. In every single case they all knew the theory but never made the connection to how it applied to the task at hand.
- ZephyrBlu 6y ago
  > If you don't actively make the real-world connections to the theory then most students will just memorize the coursework and then forget it later This almost feels like an instance of Goodhart's Law [1]: "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure" [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law
vkou 6y ago
> That's not the job of a university. If the university expects to produce graduate students, who use computers to solve research problems, teaching them how to code well helps. > A reasonably smart student picks up how to work git in a few evenings with some online tutorial and some open source project. Or just when doing their homework. The same can be said for writing comprehensible English, yet you will lose marks on your essays for poor writing.
- bonoboTP 6y ago
  What CS university programs make you write essays?
  - vkou 6y ago
    Ones offered by legitimate universities, that require bachelors to take ~12-18 credit hours of liberal arts courses. Those courses typically require you to submit essays, which will be evaluated for both their form, and their function. Given the generally poor grasp of civics, ethics, and ability to relate to other cultures that I have seen, if the job of a university is the creation of educated people (as opposed to vocational training), more liberal arts education can't go that amiss. You're also missing the main thrust of my argument. My university offered - and required - CS majors to take a number of practical, vocational courses, with many programming assignments. But it never actually took the time to train, or grade us on the quality of our solutions to those assignments. This is not how real engineers, chemists, or physicists, or folks studying bioscience get trained.
    - bonoboTP 6y ago
      > Ones offered by legitimate universities, that require bachelors to take ~12-18 credit hours of liberal arts courses. I see. That's rather a peculiarity of the American system, in Europe, higher ed is more specialized and broad, general liberal arts education ends at the high school level. > But it never actually took the time to train, or grade us on the quality of our solutions to those assignments. I've worked as a teaching assistant, and it's often due to a lack of staffing and time. TA's are most of the time also PhD students and they have projects to work on and papers to write and giving detailed feedback on assignments is infeasible beyond a certain number of submissions. The same with exams. They are optimized to be easy to unambiguously grade in the shortest time possible. There's a conflict between two roles of the university: research and teaching. Research is more important for one's advancement, so teaching gets neglected.

vvanders 6y ago

If you don't actively make the real-world connections to the theory then most students will just memorize the coursework and then forget it later. The number of times I have to walk through why linear memory access matters, how caches and branch predictors work is staggeringly high. In every single case they all knew the theory but never made the connection to how it applied to the task at hand.

ZephyrBlu 6y ago
> If you don't actively make the real-world connections to the theory then most students will just memorize the coursework and then forget it later This almost feels like an instance of Goodhart's Law [1]: "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure" [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law

vkou 6y ago

> That's not the job of a university. If the university expects to produce graduate students, who use computers to solve research problems, teaching them how to code well helps. > A reasonably smart student picks up how to work git in a few evenings with some online tutorial and some open source project. Or just when doing their homework. The same can be said for writing comprehensible English, yet you will lose marks on your essays for poor writing.

bonoboTP 6y ago
What CS university programs make you write essays?
- vkou 6y ago
  Ones offered by legitimate universities, that require bachelors to take ~12-18 credit hours of liberal arts courses. Those courses typically require you to submit essays, which will be evaluated for both their form, and their function. Given the generally poor grasp of civics, ethics, and ability to relate to other cultures that I have seen, if the job of a university is the creation of educated people (as opposed to vocational training), more liberal arts education can't go that amiss. You're also missing the main thrust of my argument. My university offered - and required - CS majors to take a number of practical, vocational courses, with many programming assignments. But it never actually took the time to train, or grade us on the quality of our solutions to those assignments. This is not how real engineers, chemists, or physicists, or folks studying bioscience get trained.
  - bonoboTP 6y ago
    > Ones offered by legitimate universities, that require bachelors to take ~12-18 credit hours of liberal arts courses. I see. That's rather a peculiarity of the American system, in Europe, higher ed is more specialized and broad, general liberal arts education ends at the high school level. > But it never actually took the time to train, or grade us on the quality of our solutions to those assignments. I've worked as a teaching assistant, and it's often due to a lack of staffing and time. TA's are most of the time also PhD students and they have projects to work on and papers to write and giving detailed feedback on assignments is infeasible beyond a certain number of submissions. The same with exams. They are optimized to be easy to unambiguously grade in the shortest time possible. There's a conflict between two roles of the university: research and teaching. Research is more important for one's advancement, so teaching gets neglected.