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It's amazing how many CS programs fail to teach you even the basic tools of being a software developer. Yes, yes, CS is not programming, but there is a non-triv

It's amazing how many CS programs fail to teach you even the basic tools of being a software developer. Yes, yes, CS is not programming, but there is a non-trivial amount of CS that is indeed programming, and that is generally what people do with their CS degrees, so it'd make sense for a CS program to teach the basics. Maybe even more than the basics.

never_inline 4y ago
In India we usually call it "Computer Science & Engineering". But name is the only thing we get right in CS education.
xavdid 4y ago
CS programs prepare you first and foremost for a PhD in CS. They're great for learning the theory and fundamentals, but teach practical Software Engineering skills as a side effect.
- sroussey 4y ago
  This very much varies by school. In California, undergrad as prep for grad school is the default for the UC system, but not so for the Cal State system.
- warner25 4y ago
  Ironically, as a CS PhD student I spend an enormous amount of my time on the subject matter listed. There are very few research areas in which PhD students can get away with ignorance of the command line, shell environments, build systems, version control, debugging, etc. A common scenario is that I want to reproduce and extend some earlier research, and there's a GitHub repository for it that hasn't been touched for the last seven years, which was forked from an even older repository that some grad student hastily pieced together. And I need to run components of it on our high-performance computing cluster, where I don't have sudo privileges. So it's whole lot of moving things around between VMs and Docker containers, figuring out what to do about ancient versions of packages and libraries that are dependencies (especially everything that's still written for Python 2.7); either refactoring things to update it all, because I want to take advantage of newer functionality, or setting up some isolated environment with older releases of everything built from source.
vincent-manis 4y ago
I was on the CS faculty at a Canadian university in the 1980s. I proposed a course with almost exactly this outline, only to be told it wasn't university-level material. MIT seems not to have got this message; good on them!
pjmlp 4y ago
I think this is mostly a US thing, or countries based on similar education systems. In Portugal our computing degrees are Informatics Engineering to use a literal translation, a mix of CS stuff and Engineering. And validated by the Engineering Order as fulfilling certain requirements, for anyone that at end of the degree also wants to do the admission exam for the professional title. Those that only care about the theory part of CS take a mathematics degree with major in computing.

never_inline 4y ago

In India we usually call it "Computer Science & Engineering". But name is the only thing we get right in CS education.

xavdid 4y ago

CS programs prepare you first and foremost for a PhD in CS. They're great for learning the theory and fundamentals, but teach practical Software Engineering skills as a side effect.

sroussey 4y ago
This very much varies by school. In California, undergrad as prep for grad school is the default for the UC system, but not so for the Cal State system.
warner25 4y ago
Ironically, as a CS PhD student I spend an enormous amount of my time on the subject matter listed. There are very few research areas in which PhD students can get away with ignorance of the command line, shell environments, build systems, version control, debugging, etc. A common scenario is that I want to reproduce and extend some earlier research, and there's a GitHub repository for it that hasn't been touched for the last seven years, which was forked from an even older repository that some grad student hastily pieced together. And I need to run components of it on our high-performance computing cluster, where I don't have sudo privileges. So it's whole lot of moving things around between VMs and Docker containers, figuring out what to do about ancient versions of packages and libraries that are dependencies (especially everything that's still written for Python 2.7); either refactoring things to update it all, because I want to take advantage of newer functionality, or setting up some isolated environment with older releases of everything built from source.

vincent-manis 4y ago

I was on the CS faculty at a Canadian university in the 1980s. I proposed a course with almost exactly this outline, only to be told it wasn't university-level material. MIT seems not to have got this message; good on them!

pjmlp 4y ago

I think this is mostly a US thing, or countries based on similar education systems. In Portugal our computing degrees are Informatics Engineering to use a literal translation, a mix of CS stuff and Engineering. And validated by the Engineering Order as fulfilling certain requirements, for anyone that at end of the degree also wants to do the admission exam for the professional title. Those that only care about the theory part of CS take a mathematics degree with major in computing.