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I went to a pretty unremarkable state school and took compiler construction classes, OS classes, AI classes, deep networking classes, etc. Pretty standard cours

I went to a pretty unremarkable state school and took compiler construction classes, OS classes, AI classes, deep networking classes, etc. Pretty standard course load for many CS BS programs - then (16 years ago) and now. I really don’t think most modern CS programs are glorified bootcamps. Not sure where you’re getting that from.

benrbray 6y ago
I went to two top-ten public research universities and can confirm they were glorified boot camps, unless you get really lucky in your course selection. Some of the worst offenders were: * A graduate-level parallel computing class taught in sync with a 1000-person online class aimed at OMCS students. For the level of depth we went into, I may as well have just taken a Coursera course. * A PhD seminar on compilers, led by a tenured professor who was reusing slides from 2002 and seemed not to know anything about modern compiler theory or practice. "Huh? What do you mean a 'lattice'?" he said. Thankfully his TA cared enough to develop some projects around LLVM, which is the only useful bit of knowledge I took away from the course. * A natural language processing course with a severely outdated bibliography, where the projects required us to make changes to convoluted "starter code" riddled with bugs. Half of the final exam was manually computing the probability table (by hand, on paper, without a calculator) for a quite complicated probabilistic context-free grammar. * A machine learning course where the lecture slides were written by the TA, and where the professor was often seeing the slides for the very first time five minutes before lecture. And that's just the courses I was able to take. * For my entire four years as an undergraduate at a large public university, there were no classes offered on the topics of programming language theory or computer graphics. They simply couldn't attract research faculty in these areas, and instead of hiring a lecturer, they thought it better not to offer the subjects at all. * When I became a graduate student at another large public university, I was excited at the chance to finally take some PL + graphics courses. But nope, during my first year, all of the PL + graphics faculty left to join other universities / industry.
- throwaway8581 6y ago
  To be fair, I don't think an intro level compiler class needs anything that's changed since 2002. Almost any software class that did a competent job teaching you about the state of the art circa 1995, you'd be in great shape. A few exceptions maybe are machine learning and other "AI" fields, where even the principles have dramatically changed. Everything newer you will learn on the job.
  - benrbray 6y ago
    This was a graduate-level research seminar, whose purpose was ostensibly to prepare graduate students to conduct research in this area. Unfortunately, my undergraduate compilers course covered more material than this one. I think these days, a proper compilers course should also be a comparative study of programming languages. There is a lot to learn from comparing how C++ vs Python vs Haskell go from text -> machine code. There are both practical and theoretical aspects to this, and I would expect a graduate-level research-focused course to cover the more theoretical side.
- sakopov 6y ago
  > For the level of depth we went into, I may as well have just taken a Coursera course. This may be true for graduate programs, but I wholeheartedly believe that undergrad Comp Sci programs should be completed at a 4-year school mostly because the course work is less specialized, much easier to teach and generally attracts pretty decent pool of instructors at most schools. Additionally, bootcamps are not online courses and shouldn't be conflated. A 6 to 9-months bootcamp goes through material at such a high pace that it often becomes counter-productive. I have a friend who paid $10K for a 6-months bootcamp, got burned out and learned very little in the end. The entire experience basically turned him away. I have another friend who started Comp Sci program at a community college and he's been absolutely happy with overall experience and pace. I have helped both of them and would generally recommend staying the hell away from bootcamps, especially with no prior programming experience.

benrbray 6y ago

I went to two top-ten public research universities and can confirm they were glorified boot camps, unless you get really lucky in your course selection. Some of the worst offenders were: * A graduate-level parallel computing class taught in sync with a 1000-person online class aimed at OMCS students. For the level of depth we went into, I may as well have just taken a Coursera course. * A PhD seminar on compilers, led by a tenured professor who was reusing slides from 2002 and seemed not to know anything about modern compiler theory or practice. "Huh? What do you mean a 'lattice'?" he said. Thankfully his TA cared enough to develop some projects around LLVM, which is the only useful bit of knowledge I took away from the course. * A natural language processing course with a severely outdated bibliography, where the projects required us to make changes to convoluted "starter code" riddled with bugs. Half of the final exam was manually computing the probability table (by hand, on paper, without a calculator) for a quite complicated probabilistic context-free grammar. * A machine learning course where the lecture slides were written by the TA, and where the professor was often seeing the slides for the very first time five minutes before lecture. And that's just the courses I was able to take. * For my entire four years as an undergraduate at a large public university, there were no classes offered on the topics of programming language theory or computer graphics. They simply couldn't attract research faculty in these areas, and instead of hiring a lecturer, they thought it better not to offer the subjects at all. * When I became a graduate student at another large public university, I was excited at the chance to finally take some PL + graphics courses. But nope, during my first year, all of the PL + graphics faculty left to join other universities / industry.

throwaway8581 6y ago
To be fair, I don't think an intro level compiler class needs anything that's changed since 2002. Almost any software class that did a competent job teaching you about the state of the art circa 1995, you'd be in great shape. A few exceptions maybe are machine learning and other "AI" fields, where even the principles have dramatically changed. Everything newer you will learn on the job.
- benrbray 6y ago
  This was a graduate-level research seminar, whose purpose was ostensibly to prepare graduate students to conduct research in this area. Unfortunately, my undergraduate compilers course covered more material than this one. I think these days, a proper compilers course should also be a comparative study of programming languages. There is a lot to learn from comparing how C++ vs Python vs Haskell go from text -> machine code. There are both practical and theoretical aspects to this, and I would expect a graduate-level research-focused course to cover the more theoretical side.
sakopov 6y ago
> For the level of depth we went into, I may as well have just taken a Coursera course. This may be true for graduate programs, but I wholeheartedly believe that undergrad Comp Sci programs should be completed at a 4-year school mostly because the course work is less specialized, much easier to teach and generally attracts pretty decent pool of instructors at most schools. Additionally, bootcamps are not online courses and shouldn't be conflated. A 6 to 9-months bootcamp goes through material at such a high pace that it often becomes counter-productive. I have a friend who paid $10K for a 6-months bootcamp, got burned out and learned very little in the end. The entire experience basically turned him away. I have another friend who started Comp Sci program at a community college and he's been absolutely happy with overall experience and pace. I have helped both of them and would generally recommend staying the hell away from bootcamps, especially with no prior programming experience.