7 ms·

MIT Missing Semester 2026

91 points by vismit2000 10mo ago

kratom_sandwich 10mo ago
Awesome course and I encourage everyone to check out the previous iteration (and the corresponding discussions on HN)
ghaff 10mo ago
There's definitely a tension at top STEM schools (probably especially in CS) between assuming students have some baseline knowledge of whatever field and just tossing them into the deep end of the pool and figuring out the practicalities on their own. I did take one of the MIT intro CS MOOCs at one point for kicks. Very good. But it was more or less learn Python on your own if you don't already know it (or how to program more broadly). That doesn't really happen in a lot of other disciplines other than some areas of the arts.
- cylentwolf 10mo ago
  I feel like most first intro classes in Computer Science is learn the coding language on your own. At first I was like why? Why don't they hold our hands while we do this. But since I have had some space to look back it really is a pretty good representation of our industry. You are going to need to learn new languages. So getting thrown in the deep end is a pretty good precursor for what work is going to look like.
  - ghaff 10mo ago
    I don't totally disagree. On the other hand, based on the MOOC I took, had I been going in literally cold (as in college, new experiences, this is my chance to dive into CS and programming), I'd have been completely lost in a way that wouldn't have been the case in other engineering disciplines. Now, I'm sure some would argue "tough." What are you doing at MIT then? And certainly, there are SO many opportunities these days to get some grounding in a way that may not be as readily possible with chemistry much less nuclear engineering for example. But it is something I think about now and then.
    - griffzhowl 10mo ago
      Is the MOOC the same as the actual MIT course though? I went through one of the old Grimson Guttag Intro to CS courses on MIT OCW years ago, with zero programming background I found it a very gentle on-ramp with all the basics explained. I think it was this one, unfortunately archived now. I don't know the new one https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/6-00-introduction-to-computer-science-and-programming-fall-2008/ https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/6-00-introduction-to-computer-sc...
      - ghaff 10mo ago
        No idea how similar it was to what's taught in the classroom. Of course you have access to TAs and other students IRL. And I have no doubt that assumptions about prior exposure and skills have changed over time. I can only report that, had you dumped me into that content with those assignments, with no prior background I'd probably have been dropping that class. The online version was more Grimson on the algorithms and Guttag (who wrote the Python book) on a bit of the programming. But the emphasis was more on the algorithms.
    - somenameforme 10mo ago
      What makes you think this would not have been the case in other engineering disciplines? I'm also a CS guy so I can't directly challenge this on the whole, but my experiences in some classes outside of this in other domains didn't feel like they were 'comfortably' paced at all. Without extensive out-of-class work I'd have been completely lost in no time. In fact one electrical engineering course I took was ironically considered a weed out course, for computer science, as it was required, and was probably the most brutal (and amazing) class I've ever taken in my life.
      - ghaff 10mo ago
        Personal experience? I had basically a machine shop course in mechanical engineering in college. OK, it was a bit more than that but I had no "shop" in high school. Certainly nothing in high school anything that would have really prepared me for a civil engineering or or chemical engineering degree. I had actually done a little bit of fiddling around with electronics (and maybe should have majored in that). But certainly college would have been a whole different level. (With a whole lot more math which was never my strong suit.) So, yeah, these days I think there's a different baseline assumption for CS/programming than many other majors.
  - kenjackson 10mo ago
    This isn’t a bad idea, just not for the intro course. When I was an undergrad “programming language” was this course. You were given a brief introduction to brew languages and paradigms then expected to figure it out from there. But at this point you had a foundation of experience to build on.
- throwaway20174 10mo ago
  It's tough to for me to judge cause I've been programming for 30 years maybe I'm underestimating how hard it is, but I look at learning a new language very different that trying to understand the graduate level CS work I've seen at a top STEM school. Git, shell, basics.. even simple python if you have any at all programming experience - not nearly as hard as what they're teaching in the class. Most of the time something like that like learning latex or git basics.. they'll say.. you'll pick up what you need. They're not gonna spend 12 weeks on those subjects they aren't hard enough.
  - ghaff 10mo ago
    Discrete tools are fairly easy. On the other hand, I think a lot of people here would laugh at the "text book" for the introductory FORTRAN course I took at said school. Of course, you were struggling with fairly primitive tools at the time as well. Made a typo? Time to beg the grad students running the facility for some more compute cycles. Although it's out of print I don't immediately see a full copy online. https://www2.seas.gwu.edu/~kaufman1/FortranColoringBook/ColoringBkCover.html https://www2.seas.gwu.edu/~kaufman1/FortranColoringBook/Colo...
- andai 10mo ago
  At one university I went to, the head of the CS department was quoted as saying "[We don't need to care about the job market,] Our job is to create researchers." I thought that was pretty strange at the time because like 5% of the students end up going into research. So that was basically like him saying I'm totally cool with our educational program being misaligned for 95% percent of our customers... Maybe it makes sense for the big picture though. If all the breakthroughs come from those 5%, it might benefit everyone to optimize for them. (I don't expect they would have called the program particularly optimized either though ;)
  - ghaff 10mo ago
    Probably one of those thoughts you should self-filter (and the alumni association sure wishes you would). But it's also the case that (only half-joking) a lot of faculty at research universities regard most undergrads as an inconvenience at best.
    - andai 10mo ago
      It depends on the university, but the filtering thing is very true. In my experience, the more advanced the material, the worse the teachers are. Or more precisely, the improvement in teaching does not usually keep up with the increase in difficulty. (There appears to be no correlation, in fact.) Which implies that the better a university is (the more difficult the material), the more it relies on filtering rather than education. Which seems to be in line with how the top universities are perceived anyway as selection criteria, primarily places to get a network, rather than places to get an education. It's neither good nor bad, but it is a little sad :) --- I do notice that my assumption here is that the more difficult the university is, the better it is. I think this is broadly true, both objectively and subjectively, at least for my purposes.
  - __loam 10mo ago
    Historically, the point of a university is not to be a jobs training program.
    - 10mo ago
- hearsathought 10mo ago
  > There's definitely a tension at top STEM schools (probably especially in CS) between assuming students have some baseline knowledge of whatever field and just tossing them into the deep end of the pool and figuring out the practicalities on their own. Pretty sure most college CS programs have an optional class for those new to programming ( Introduction to Java or C or Python ). But after that, you are expected to learn new languages/tools on your own mostly.
  - ghaff 10mo ago
    Most? Probably. Not sure how common at what are considered top schools without looking at course catalogs. I expect if you're really new to programming, jumping into a CS program at an elite school could be a bumpy ride given 90% of the class will have a fair bit of experience and the class will be pitched to that level.
    - hearsathought 10mo ago
      > Not sure how common at what are considered top schools without looking at course catalogs. I am fairly certain 100% of the top CS programs ( and 99% that every CS program ) in the country have an intro to programming class for incoming freshman with no background in programming - usually Python, Java or C. MIT does. Besides, there are tons of material online to learn programming on your own. > I expect if you're really new to programming, jumping into a CS program at an elite school could be a bumpy ride given 90% of the class will have a fair bit of experience and the class will be pitched to that level. Agreed. But the challenge isn't insurmountable.
- sharts 10mo ago
  That’s generally how CS is taught at many top schools. If someone needs handholding just to figure out python then that’s bad news for the someone
ternus 10mo ago
It's interesting to see that MIT is still like this. Canonically, there were no classes that taught programming per se: if you needed that, there were (often volunteer-taught) courses over IAP, the January Independent Activities Period, that would attempt to fill the gap - but you were still expected to pick it up on your own. I taught the Caffeinated Crash Course in C way back when. Good times.
- ghaff 10mo ago
  Way back in the day, you did have a few programming classes especially outside of CS/EE given that it was perfectly reasonable for students to have no or little prior exposure to computers and programming. See FORTRAN coloring book. And, as you say, although I haven't dropped by since pre-COVID, there was as you say a smattering of stuff during IAP. But my general sense based on some level of connections is you're expected to figure out a lot of, for lack of a better term, practicalities on your own. I don't think there's a lot of hand-holding in many cases--probably more so in some domains than others.
  - kkylin 10mo ago
    Yup. Back in my day there was 1.00, a Civil Engineering course, a pretty standard intro to programming in plain old C. I don't know if it still exists. There was nothing of that sort in EECS, though there are lots of IAP courses (which take place in January, before spring semester starts). IMO a month is about right to spend on (leisurely) picking up a programming language for fun. A friend and I learned APL that way.
    - icambron 10mo ago
      In 2004 or so, 1.00 was an intro to Java course. I took it very cynically to pad out my units; I was a course 6 senior at the time. I got side-eyed by TAs a lot.
      - kkylin 10mo ago
        Yes, 1.00 was popular with Course 6ers who wanted easy units.
tekknolagi 10mo ago
If you're interested, see also https://bernsteinbear.com/isdt/ https://bernsteinbear.com/isdt/ by me and Tom
LasEspuelas 10mo ago
There should be something like this available for any student at University, regardless of field. Perhaps less geared towards programming tasks but basic computing productivity.
loughnane 10mo ago
Anyone know how/if this differs from the 2020 one? Edit: Nvm, they comment on it. https://missing.csail.mit.edu/2026/development-environment/ https://missing.csail.mit.edu/2026/development-environment/
- red-iron-pine 10mo ago
  good link but I want to call out how they expect you to use AI like Claude. wonder how that's gonna work and if students will learn...
russfink 10mo ago
Link to the About page that clearly describes the effort and rationale. https://missing.csail.mit.edu/about/ https://missing.csail.mit.edu/about/
russfink 10mo ago
Conspicuously missing is a direct mention of AI tools. Is MIT, like others, side-stepping the use of AI by students to (help them) complete homework assignments and projects?
- elephanlemon 10mo ago
  If you click through the lectures they are mentioned in several of them.
- Reubachi 10mo ago
  A question. If you think AI use by students to "bypass homework" is anything remotely approaching a problem, then I must ask you how you felt/feel about: - University being cost prohibitive to 90 percent of all humans as financial driven institutions, not performance. - Before AI, 20 + years of google data indexing/searches fueling academia - study groups before that allowing group completion (or, cheating, in your view) - The textbook that costs 500 dollars, or the textbook software from pearson that costs 500, that has the homework answers. I think it's a silly posit that students using AI is...anything to even think about. I use it at my fortune 500 job every day, and have learned about my field's practical day-to-day from it than any textbook, homework assignment, practical etc.
  - ghaff 10mo ago
    >study groups before that allowing group completion (or, cheating, in your view) Totally dependent on school/department/professor policy. Some are very strict. Others allow working together on assignments. (And then there are specific group projects.)
anonu 10mo ago
I always thought this practical side of development was missing in a CS or engineering curriculum. This is awesome. For similar reasons I think arts and humanities students should take marketing and business courses.
- ghaff 10mo ago
  There are probably books out there that probably do a better job than most discrete courses I can think of--i.e. an accounting course is probably too in the weeds for most people--but I agree that some sort of business/marketing/finance 101 would be useful for a lot of people (engineers as well).
genix 10mo ago
very useful, took me couple months brute forcing to grasp the know hows because my school doesn't teach it. glad to see a course for it now getting out there
alexpotato 10mo ago
I was an undergrad at Rutgers in the late 1990s as they transitioned from teaching Pascal to Java for the introductory CS classes. The lectures were primarily about algorithms, basic data structures etc and the extra "labs", taught by Teaching Assistants, was almost always for reviewing the lecture notes with a focus on answering questions. At no point was there any discussion around "hey, here is a good way to design, write and test a program in a compiled language". My prior experience was with BASIC so just figuring out how to compile a program was a skill to pick up. I thankfully picked it up quickly but others struggled. Another thing I saw often was people writing ENTIRE programs and then trying to compile them and getting "you have 500 compilation errors". I never wrote programs this way, I was more "write a couple lines, compile, see what happens etc" but it always struck me that even just suggesting that option in class would have helped a lot of folks. (This being HN, I'm sure some people will say that students figuring this stuff out on their own helps weed out non-serious people but I still don't 100% buy that argument)
kkfx 10mo ago
Basic FLOSS desktop knowledge must be in high schools for everyone, you can't study in the modern time without contemporary tools. LaTeX must also be in the game, because we need people who know how to express themselves crafting good quality documents.
musicale 10mo ago
This looks like it is part of MIT's Independent Activities Period (IAP)? Which seems like a brilliant idea (part of their 4-1-4 academic calendar.) https://elo.mit.edu/iap/ https://elo.mit.edu/iap/

91 points by vismit2000 10mo ago

Awesome course and I encourage everyone to check out the previous iteration (and the corresponding discussions on HN)

ghaff 10mo ago

There's definitely a tension at top STEM schools (probably especially in CS) between assuming students have some baseline knowledge of whatever field and just tossing them into the deep end of the pool and figuring out the practicalities on their own. I did take one of the MIT intro CS MOOCs at one point for kicks. Very good. But it was more or less learn Python on your own if you don't already know it (or how to program more broadly). That doesn't really happen in a lot of other disciplines other than some areas of the arts.

cylentwolf 10mo ago
I feel like most first intro classes in Computer Science is learn the coding language on your own. At first I was like why? Why don't they hold our hands while we do this. But since I have had some space to look back it really is a pretty good representation of our industry. You are going to need to learn new languages. So getting thrown in the deep end is a pretty good precursor for what work is going to look like.
- ghaff 10mo ago
  I don't totally disagree. On the other hand, based on the MOOC I took, had I been going in literally cold (as in college, new experiences, this is my chance to dive into CS and programming), I'd have been completely lost in a way that wouldn't have been the case in other engineering disciplines. Now, I'm sure some would argue "tough." What are you doing at MIT then? And certainly, there are SO many opportunities these days to get some grounding in a way that may not be as readily possible with chemistry much less nuclear engineering for example. But it is something I think about now and then.
  - griffzhowl 10mo ago
    Is the MOOC the same as the actual MIT course though? I went through one of the old Grimson Guttag Intro to CS courses on MIT OCW years ago, with zero programming background I found it a very gentle on-ramp with all the basics explained. I think it was this one, unfortunately archived now. I don't know the new one https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/6-00-introduction-to-computer-science-and-programming-fall-2008/ https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/6-00-introduction-to-computer-sc...
    - ghaff 10mo ago
      No idea how similar it was to what's taught in the classroom. Of course you have access to TAs and other students IRL. And I have no doubt that assumptions about prior exposure and skills have changed over time. I can only report that, had you dumped me into that content with those assignments, with no prior background I'd probably have been dropping that class. The online version was more Grimson on the algorithms and Guttag (who wrote the Python book) on a bit of the programming. But the emphasis was more on the algorithms.
  - somenameforme 10mo ago
    What makes you think this would not have been the case in other engineering disciplines? I'm also a CS guy so I can't directly challenge this on the whole, but my experiences in some classes outside of this in other domains didn't feel like they were 'comfortably' paced at all. Without extensive out-of-class work I'd have been completely lost in no time. In fact one electrical engineering course I took was ironically considered a weed out course, for computer science, as it was required, and was probably the most brutal (and amazing) class I've ever taken in my life.
    - ghaff 10mo ago
      Personal experience? I had basically a machine shop course in mechanical engineering in college. OK, it was a bit more than that but I had no "shop" in high school. Certainly nothing in high school anything that would have really prepared me for a civil engineering or or chemical engineering degree. I had actually done a little bit of fiddling around with electronics (and maybe should have majored in that). But certainly college would have been a whole different level. (With a whole lot more math which was never my strong suit.) So, yeah, these days I think there's a different baseline assumption for CS/programming than many other majors.
- kenjackson 10mo ago
  This isn’t a bad idea, just not for the intro course. When I was an undergrad “programming language” was this course. You were given a brief introduction to brew languages and paradigms then expected to figure it out from there. But at this point you had a foundation of experience to build on.
throwaway20174 10mo ago
It's tough to for me to judge cause I've been programming for 30 years maybe I'm underestimating how hard it is, but I look at learning a new language very different that trying to understand the graduate level CS work I've seen at a top STEM school. Git, shell, basics.. even simple python if you have any at all programming experience - not nearly as hard as what they're teaching in the class. Most of the time something like that like learning latex or git basics.. they'll say.. you'll pick up what you need. They're not gonna spend 12 weeks on those subjects they aren't hard enough.
- ghaff 10mo ago
  Discrete tools are fairly easy. On the other hand, I think a lot of people here would laugh at the "text book" for the introductory FORTRAN course I took at said school. Of course, you were struggling with fairly primitive tools at the time as well. Made a typo? Time to beg the grad students running the facility for some more compute cycles. Although it's out of print I don't immediately see a full copy online. https://www2.seas.gwu.edu/~kaufman1/FortranColoringBook/ColoringBkCover.html https://www2.seas.gwu.edu/~kaufman1/FortranColoringBook/Colo...
andai 10mo ago
At one university I went to, the head of the CS department was quoted as saying "[We don't need to care about the job market,] Our job is to create researchers." I thought that was pretty strange at the time because like 5% of the students end up going into research. So that was basically like him saying I'm totally cool with our educational program being misaligned for 95% percent of our customers... Maybe it makes sense for the big picture though. If all the breakthroughs come from those 5%, it might benefit everyone to optimize for them. (I don't expect they would have called the program particularly optimized either though ;)
- ghaff 10mo ago
  Probably one of those thoughts you should self-filter (and the alumni association sure wishes you would). But it's also the case that (only half-joking) a lot of faculty at research universities regard most undergrads as an inconvenience at best.
  - andai 10mo ago
    It depends on the university, but the filtering thing is very true. In my experience, the more advanced the material, the worse the teachers are. Or more precisely, the improvement in teaching does not usually keep up with the increase in difficulty. (There appears to be no correlation, in fact.) Which implies that the better a university is (the more difficult the material), the more it relies on filtering rather than education. Which seems to be in line with how the top universities are perceived anyway as selection criteria, primarily places to get a network, rather than places to get an education. It's neither good nor bad, but it is a little sad :) --- I do notice that my assumption here is that the more difficult the university is, the better it is. I think this is broadly true, both objectively and subjectively, at least for my purposes.
- __loam 10mo ago
  Historically, the point of a university is not to be a jobs training program.
  - 10mo ago
hearsathought 10mo ago
> There's definitely a tension at top STEM schools (probably especially in CS) between assuming students have some baseline knowledge of whatever field and just tossing them into the deep end of the pool and figuring out the practicalities on their own. Pretty sure most college CS programs have an optional class for those new to programming ( Introduction to Java or C or Python ). But after that, you are expected to learn new languages/tools on your own mostly.
- ghaff 10mo ago
  Most? Probably. Not sure how common at what are considered top schools without looking at course catalogs. I expect if you're really new to programming, jumping into a CS program at an elite school could be a bumpy ride given 90% of the class will have a fair bit of experience and the class will be pitched to that level.
  - hearsathought 10mo ago
    > Not sure how common at what are considered top schools without looking at course catalogs. I am fairly certain 100% of the top CS programs ( and 99% that every CS program ) in the country have an intro to programming class for incoming freshman with no background in programming - usually Python, Java or C. MIT does. Besides, there are tons of material online to learn programming on your own. > I expect if you're really new to programming, jumping into a CS program at an elite school could be a bumpy ride given 90% of the class will have a fair bit of experience and the class will be pitched to that level. Agreed. But the challenge isn't insurmountable.
sharts 10mo ago
That’s generally how CS is taught at many top schools. If someone needs handholding just to figure out python then that’s bad news for the someone

ternus 10mo ago

It's interesting to see that MIT is still like this. Canonically, there were no classes that taught programming per se: if you needed that, there were (often volunteer-taught) courses over IAP, the January Independent Activities Period, that would attempt to fill the gap - but you were still expected to pick it up on your own. I taught the Caffeinated Crash Course in C way back when. Good times.

ghaff 10mo ago
Way back in the day, you did have a few programming classes especially outside of CS/EE given that it was perfectly reasonable for students to have no or little prior exposure to computers and programming. See FORTRAN coloring book. And, as you say, although I haven't dropped by since pre-COVID, there was as you say a smattering of stuff during IAP. But my general sense based on some level of connections is you're expected to figure out a lot of, for lack of a better term, practicalities on your own. I don't think there's a lot of hand-holding in many cases--probably more so in some domains than others.
- kkylin 10mo ago
  Yup. Back in my day there was 1.00, a Civil Engineering course, a pretty standard intro to programming in plain old C. I don't know if it still exists. There was nothing of that sort in EECS, though there are lots of IAP courses (which take place in January, before spring semester starts). IMO a month is about right to spend on (leisurely) picking up a programming language for fun. A friend and I learned APL that way.
  - icambron 10mo ago
    In 2004 or so, 1.00 was an intro to Java course. I took it very cynically to pad out my units; I was a course 6 senior at the time. I got side-eyed by TAs a lot.
    - kkylin 10mo ago
      Yes, 1.00 was popular with Course 6ers who wanted easy units.

tekknolagi 10mo ago

If you're interested, see also https://bernsteinbear.com/isdt/ https://bernsteinbear.com/isdt/ by me and Tom

LasEspuelas 10mo ago

There should be something like this available for any student at University, regardless of field. Perhaps less geared towards programming tasks but basic computing productivity.

loughnane 10mo ago

Anyone know how/if this differs from the 2020 one? Edit: Nvm, they comment on it. https://missing.csail.mit.edu/2026/development-environment/ https://missing.csail.mit.edu/2026/development-environment/

red-iron-pine 10mo ago
good link but I want to call out how they expect you to use AI like Claude. wonder how that's gonna work and if students will learn...

russfink 10mo ago

Link to the About page that clearly describes the effort and rationale. https://missing.csail.mit.edu/about/ https://missing.csail.mit.edu/about/

russfink 10mo ago

Conspicuously missing is a direct mention of AI tools. Is MIT, like others, side-stepping the use of AI by students to (help them) complete homework assignments and projects?

elephanlemon 10mo ago
If you click through the lectures they are mentioned in several of them.
Reubachi 10mo ago
A question. If you think AI use by students to "bypass homework" is anything remotely approaching a problem, then I must ask you how you felt/feel about: - University being cost prohibitive to 90 percent of all humans as financial driven institutions, not performance. - Before AI, 20 + years of google data indexing/searches fueling academia - study groups before that allowing group completion (or, cheating, in your view) - The textbook that costs 500 dollars, or the textbook software from pearson that costs 500, that has the homework answers. I think it's a silly posit that students using AI is...anything to even think about. I use it at my fortune 500 job every day, and have learned about my field's practical day-to-day from it than any textbook, homework assignment, practical etc.
- ghaff 10mo ago
  >study groups before that allowing group completion (or, cheating, in your view) Totally dependent on school/department/professor policy. Some are very strict. Others allow working together on assignments. (And then there are specific group projects.)

anonu 10mo ago

I always thought this practical side of development was missing in a CS or engineering curriculum. This is awesome. For similar reasons I think arts and humanities students should take marketing and business courses.

ghaff 10mo ago
There are probably books out there that probably do a better job than most discrete courses I can think of--i.e. an accounting course is probably too in the weeds for most people--but I agree that some sort of business/marketing/finance 101 would be useful for a lot of people (engineers as well).

genix 10mo ago

very useful, took me couple months brute forcing to grasp the know hows because my school doesn't teach it. glad to see a course for it now getting out there

alexpotato 10mo ago

I was an undergrad at Rutgers in the late 1990s as they transitioned from teaching Pascal to Java for the introductory CS classes. The lectures were primarily about algorithms, basic data structures etc and the extra "labs", taught by Teaching Assistants, was almost always for reviewing the lecture notes with a focus on answering questions. At no point was there any discussion around "hey, here is a good way to design, write and test a program in a compiled language". My prior experience was with BASIC so just figuring out how to compile a program was a skill to pick up. I thankfully picked it up quickly but others struggled. Another thing I saw often was people writing ENTIRE programs and then trying to compile them and getting "you have 500 compilation errors". I never wrote programs this way, I was more "write a couple lines, compile, see what happens etc" but it always struck me that even just suggesting that option in class would have helped a lot of folks. (This being HN, I'm sure some people will say that students figuring this stuff out on their own helps weed out non-serious people but I still don't 100% buy that argument)

kkfx 10mo ago

Basic FLOSS desktop knowledge must be in high schools for everyone, you can't study in the modern time without contemporary tools. LaTeX must also be in the game, because we need people who know how to express themselves crafting good quality documents.

musicale 10mo ago

This looks like it is part of MIT's Independent Activities Period (IAP)? Which seems like a brilliant idea (part of their 4-1-4 academic calendar.) https://elo.mit.edu/iap/ https://elo.mit.edu/iap/