5 ms·

I think it is fantastic to make many programming hours during your education. However, I am wondering if these students would learn the computer science fundam

I think it is fantastic to make many programming hours during your education. However, I am wondering if these students would learn the computer science fundamentals which are usually found in more or less dry books. Programming analysis, logic, fundamentals of programming language implementation etcetera. You can't say: look on the internet and find the relevant papers in all those fields and synthesize the theory by yourselves. That would be highly inefficient, a problem we tackle with education. If you make the comparison to Harvard you aim for more than educating people to become good/ exceptionally effective developers in my understanding.

bsaul 12y ago
You're right, they don't ( i've interviewed people from the epitech, which was created by the same people). That's the one big shortcoming of the curriculum. They're claiming to teach the next zuckerberg or page, but they forgot that those two people have a strong general scientific background. Yet, they do create people that are truely amazing at coding.
- mathattack 12y ago
  Is it possible to pick up what they're missing later? Or is it something like Calculus or Accounting, where if you don't pick it up by college, the odds of picking it up later are negligible?
  - andrewchambers 12y ago
    It's not the odds of picking it up, its the need or willpower to do it. Most people just get by with what they already know and don't bother to try and learn anything new after a certain age.
  - bsaul 12y ago
    I don't think it's impossible, but if you have any desire or love for abstract reasonning and theory, you'll probably feel a bit sad eating projects after projects of low-level C programming. The kind of people going out of this school will most likely build OS implementation stuffs, or security appliance, or VM or compilers. But probably not a new compression or distributed concensus algorithm, unless they already have a personnal interest for the fields.
    - gbog 12y ago
      And it's ok. We need much more glue code coders than compression algorithm coders, right?
      - bsaul 12y ago
        Sure. I think this school is very useful and a genius idea btw. I just don't think that it will be the key to creating the new google in France. Unless it becomes so popular that it starts to attract people who are strong in maths ( at first this school attracted people that didn't fit in the very math oriented french education).
        brohee 12y ago
        For people that are actually very bright in France, education is not only free but they are actually paid for it. The greatest French hackers like Jean-loup Gailly (zlib) and Fabrice Bellard (ffmpeg, QEmu and much more) actually went to Polytechnique (X), where they actually got something 42 students are very unlikely to get, an extremely strong math background readily applicable to multiple fields. Fabrice Bellard was already an excellent self taught programmer at age 17 when he released LZEXE. What got him to superhero level was likely more the well rounded, traditional French generalist engineering coursework he followed at X. I completely fail to see what would attract such bright people to the 42 school, when X, ENS and a few good engineering schools and university programs are available. 42 is an excellent opportunity for the people that for some reasons didn't strive in the more traditional system, but I find the possibility it start to attract top people very remote, because being taught by students two years older than you isn't nearly as attractive as being taught by top researchers, and being on a campus and mingle with top mathematicians, physicists, biologists chemist is IMHO a lot more stimulating than being among only rejected by the system computer geeks.
        mathattack 12y ago
        Poly (& the Ecoles) are a fantastic education. It's a stretch to call it well rounded since it's 100% math, science and engineering, but those programs produce a ton of grads. They can't take everyone, though. (Hyper-competitive. It's kind of like asking if Harvard produces the superstars, or are they superstars before entering) I'm a huge fan of the elite French schools, but 42 seems to fill out the rest of the pyramid. It's not a place for people in lieu of X, it's for everyone else.
- gohrt 12y ago
  zuckerberg doesn't have any relevant computer science or non-basic programming skills (page has ~4 years more relevant computer science background that motivated google.com algorithm), and 99.99% of people in any of these schools are not going be the next zuck or page. facebook was one of dozens of social networks that were poppping up in the 2000s, and its success had more to do with investor and hiring connections then anything special about the original product. For both zuck and page, their uncommon technical accomplishments came from people they hired: a small army of very-well-educated engineers with traditional education.
  - agumonkey 12y ago
    How was Page and Brin paper on web indexing by graph connectivity received back in the days ? I get that being PhD students, paper reference numbers may be a simple thing to imagine and realize. But it was still a lot better than the technical foundation of common web search at that point. I think I remember only altavista used crawlers + index, and may not have ideas like page connectivity to sort results, while other websites being only hand collected directories.
  - bsaul 12y ago
    I do agree on Zuck, and shouldn't have added him on the list. The first version of Facebook really didn't have anything special tech wise, and pretty much anyone could have done it. Google seems much more "bleeding edge" though, and i doubt anyone not working in a university on the field could have come up with the ranking algorithm.
abetaha 12y ago
It is an interesting idea to see if forgoing formal learning through tutoring, reading material, and textbooks; and learning through team collaboration and a lot of practice would work. Like others on the thread, my hunch is that there will be a small group of self-driven students who will teach themselves using the same formal education methods: replicating the courses given in other universities, reading textbooks/papers/research, researching online, and watching MOOC style videos. This group will end up teaching the others in their class through project collaboration. But unless everyone in the class is self-driven, the result would be a couple of successful self-taught developers, and a whole lot of below average ones.
- patrickaljord 12y ago
  > the result would be a couple of successful self-taught developers, and a whole lot of below average ones. Sounds like most CS schools I know then.

bsaul 12y ago

You're right, they don't ( i've interviewed people from the epitech, which was created by the same people). That's the one big shortcoming of the curriculum. They're claiming to teach the next zuckerberg or page, but they forgot that those two people have a strong general scientific background. Yet, they do create people that are truely amazing at coding.

mathattack 12y ago
Is it possible to pick up what they're missing later? Or is it something like Calculus or Accounting, where if you don't pick it up by college, the odds of picking it up later are negligible?
- andrewchambers 12y ago
  It's not the odds of picking it up, its the need or willpower to do it. Most people just get by with what they already know and don't bother to try and learn anything new after a certain age.
- bsaul 12y ago
  I don't think it's impossible, but if you have any desire or love for abstract reasonning and theory, you'll probably feel a bit sad eating projects after projects of low-level C programming. The kind of people going out of this school will most likely build OS implementation stuffs, or security appliance, or VM or compilers. But probably not a new compression or distributed concensus algorithm, unless they already have a personnal interest for the fields.
  - gbog 12y ago
    And it's ok. We need much more glue code coders than compression algorithm coders, right?
    - bsaul 12y ago
      Sure. I think this school is very useful and a genius idea btw. I just don't think that it will be the key to creating the new google in France. Unless it becomes so popular that it starts to attract people who are strong in maths ( at first this school attracted people that didn't fit in the very math oriented french education).
      - brohee 12y ago
        For people that are actually very bright in France, education is not only free but they are actually paid for it. The greatest French hackers like Jean-loup Gailly (zlib) and Fabrice Bellard (ffmpeg, QEmu and much more) actually went to Polytechnique (X), where they actually got something 42 students are very unlikely to get, an extremely strong math background readily applicable to multiple fields. Fabrice Bellard was already an excellent self taught programmer at age 17 when he released LZEXE. What got him to superhero level was likely more the well rounded, traditional French generalist engineering coursework he followed at X. I completely fail to see what would attract such bright people to the 42 school, when X, ENS and a few good engineering schools and university programs are available. 42 is an excellent opportunity for the people that for some reasons didn't strive in the more traditional system, but I find the possibility it start to attract top people very remote, because being taught by students two years older than you isn't nearly as attractive as being taught by top researchers, and being on a campus and mingle with top mathematicians, physicists, biologists chemist is IMHO a lot more stimulating than being among only rejected by the system computer geeks.
        mathattack 12y ago
        Poly (& the Ecoles) are a fantastic education. It's a stretch to call it well rounded since it's 100% math, science and engineering, but those programs produce a ton of grads. They can't take everyone, though. (Hyper-competitive. It's kind of like asking if Harvard produces the superstars, or are they superstars before entering) I'm a huge fan of the elite French schools, but 42 seems to fill out the rest of the pyramid. It's not a place for people in lieu of X, it's for everyone else.
gohrt 12y ago
zuckerberg doesn't have any relevant computer science or non-basic programming skills (page has ~4 years more relevant computer science background that motivated google.com algorithm), and 99.99% of people in any of these schools are not going be the next zuck or page. facebook was one of dozens of social networks that were poppping up in the 2000s, and its success had more to do with investor and hiring connections then anything special about the original product. For both zuck and page, their uncommon technical accomplishments came from people they hired: a small army of very-well-educated engineers with traditional education.
- agumonkey 12y ago
  How was Page and Brin paper on web indexing by graph connectivity received back in the days ? I get that being PhD students, paper reference numbers may be a simple thing to imagine and realize. But it was still a lot better than the technical foundation of common web search at that point. I think I remember only altavista used crawlers + index, and may not have ideas like page connectivity to sort results, while other websites being only hand collected directories.
- bsaul 12y ago
  I do agree on Zuck, and shouldn't have added him on the list. The first version of Facebook really didn't have anything special tech wise, and pretty much anyone could have done it. Google seems much more "bleeding edge" though, and i doubt anyone not working in a university on the field could have come up with the ranking algorithm.

abetaha 12y ago

It is an interesting idea to see if forgoing formal learning through tutoring, reading material, and textbooks; and learning through team collaboration and a lot of practice would work. Like others on the thread, my hunch is that there will be a small group of self-driven students who will teach themselves using the same formal education methods: replicating the courses given in other universities, reading textbooks/papers/research, researching online, and watching MOOC style videos. This group will end up teaching the others in their class through project collaboration. But unless everyone in the class is self-driven, the result would be a couple of successful self-taught developers, and a whole lot of below average ones.

patrickaljord 12y ago
> the result would be a couple of successful self-taught developers, and a whole lot of below average ones. Sounds like most CS schools I know then.