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I was a CS student for 2 semesters at Northeastern before dropping out thanks to a job offer. No prior coding experience. I think that the curriculum design an
by hahahacorn 2y ago
I was a CS student for 2 semesters at Northeastern before dropping out thanks to a job offer. No prior coding experience.
I think that the curriculum design and principles that guide the NEU CS education are fantastic. I’ve been fortunate (or unfortunate, depending on your perspective) to quickly find myself in a mentorship position at work, and there have been a number of times where I realize that the boot camp hire just isn’t thinking the way I do _at all_. The first things drilled into my head were function signatures and manipulating data structures (by implementing a subset of the ruby enumerable module in Racket). This has made problem solving by manipulating data structures (a decently common part of the job, especially at first!) genuinely trivial. Things more or less immediately translate to a map, filter, andmap, ormap, or reduce when trying to get data from its input to its output for whatever unit of work I’m trying to do.
Other developers on my team though experience each new technique/thing as a new or different thing, which to me seems far more overwhelming. I think most developers naturally develop the intuition, but being told upfront “everything is just these 5 or a combination of them lol” implicitly by the work we were doing was something I’m grateful for.
I never enjoyed the pair programming at Northeastern. I was so behind my peers at the time, since most everyone else was like an AP CS student or had been coding since they were a child. I was busy trying to brute force the learning with 40+ hour weeks just for the CS fundamentals classes. I never found someone in my position. I was only paired with people that the intro course was trivial for or they just did not care at all haha. Most brutal part was waiting 5+ hours at office hours with a white board wait list 90+ names deep and then office hours would end and they would send us home. Life before ChatGPT was crazy.
- BOOSTERHIDROGEN 2y agoAre there any books that discuss this technique?
- lmz 2y agoFrom the linked article : "How to Design Programs is the first text book on programming that explicitly spells out how to construct programs in a systematic manner."
- noelwelsh 2y agoIt's the philosophy behind How to Design Programs (https://htdp.org/ https://htdp.org/) and Matthias' other educational works. On HtDP might be relevant to your interests (https://felleisen.org/matthias/OnHtDP/index.html https://felleisen.org/matthias/OnHtDP/index.html)
- _yy01 2y agoYou didn't explain how the "bootcamp grads" thought process differs from yours. > Things more or less immediately translate to a map, filter, andmap, ormap, or reduce when trying to get data from its input to its output for whatever unit of work I’m trying to do It comes across as smug. "How dare these bootcamp grads write a for loop when I am wrangling a complex reduce expression." Even thought that may not be what you meant. Probably why people even around here find the PLT nerds obnoxious. whatever you described is often not the hard part of the code at $dayjob. Also for most people database dictates the choice of data structure and algorithm. CS is not complete without compilers, networks, DBs, OSes and computer architecture. Yet somehow PLT nerds pretend they unlocked a super power with map and reduce.
- hahahacorn 2y agoWell I certainly didn’t do well in English class! After re-reading my comment, you certainly _could_ read it in a smug/conceited tone. And I did explain my thoughts, they approach each logic problem with more novelty than I do, not for a lack of practice or ability, but for a lack of a mental model to map heuristics to. But I will say that my comments to them, and here, come from a place of wanting to raise all tides, so to speak. There is no smugness where there is no (or little) ego, and I think you’re projecting yourself onto my comment.
- rramadass 2y agoGood response. The GP is trying to be woke where it is not warranted. > they approach each logic problem with more novelty than I do, not for a lack of practice or ability, but for a lack of a mental model to map heuristics to. Very right; A proper "mental model" is fundamental to all types of learning.
- _yy01 2y agoI am not woke. I don't support boot camps. I just hold that PLT or DSA are not end-all of CS. You learn more by studying OS, Networks, compilers, DBMS, processor architecture. But somehow PLT nerds pretend knowing map and filter is a superpower. Just like kubernetes people think they can throw distributed systems at any problem.
- Theroou 2y agoIf a university charges you $32,495/term (Northeastern ) for fulltime when in a lot of other countries people make a living feeding their families with 20,000 us dollars or less, why on earth would you wait for 5+ hours to get help from the professor? There should be as many professors and TAs as possible to help you out!
- kragen 2y agoIt costs more than that to put food on your family in Boston, and most of that money goes to rent-seeking administrators rather than TAs and professors.
- Ryan5453 2y agoThere is a decently large amount of TAs for the freshman first semester course (aka Fundies 1) — this semester has 77 TAs
- atomicnumber3 2y ago"translate to a map, filter, andmap, ormap, or reduce" A hadoop programmer is born