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I'm wondering if pressure on MIT to develop demonstrable practical skills in underclassmen has increased since (classic) 6.001 was introduced. I mean, if you'r
by sethg 18y ago
I'm wondering if pressure on MIT to develop demonstrable practical skills in underclassmen has increased since (classic) 6.001 was introduced. I mean, if you're smart enough to get into MIT in the first place and you learn Scheme as a sophomore and CLU as a junior, then by the time you graduate and look for a job, you should be able to get up to speed pretty quickly in Java or C++ or whatever the flavor of the month is. But if you're looking for work in the summer between your sophomore and junior year, the employers don't want you to spend two weeks out of a two-month internship learning the syntax of an industry-standard language.
- wheels 18y agoI've not found a college on the planet that graduates good programmers. It's something you have to learn from experience, and a college curriculum simply include enough large coding projects for people to become good. I regularly run across code in recommendations stuff written by Ivy League post docs and most of it's pretty bad, even if the ideas it implements are smart. I think that realizing that universities can't effectively teach programming should be at the root of choosing which programming languages are used in computer science instruction. In college you get loaded up with the right concepts that will later facilitate you as a programmer, and I think languages chosen should be languages that are geared to that end. Perhaps the most instructive thing I've seen for student programmers, and which pays to boot, is Google's Summer of Code. That throws students in with a bunch of brutally honest and usually seasoned hackers and makes them fare for their own for a summer.