Computer science courses that don't exist, but should

http://prog21.dadgum.com/210.html

by Scramblejams • 11 years ago

415 247 11 years ago

prog21.dadgum.com

arfar• 11 years ago

UNIX "ls" tool is a case study in excessive command line switches.

'ls' is a bag of weird (bad?) UX. When first starting on the command line, I could never figure out how grepping the output of ls actually worked. Then I think I looked at some of the code, or someone told me, that when ls outputs, it checks to see where the data is going, if it's STDOUT then it pretty prints columns (and probably other things), otherwise it just the more sane 1 line per item.

breadbox• 11 years ago

Yes, via the isatty() syscall. ls is hardly the only Unix tool that does this; it's just the most well-known example.

steckerbrett• 11 years ago

Here I am using `ls -1` for years without realizing the redundancy.

akkartik• 11 years ago

You probably got that into your muscle memory before 'ls' got smarter. I'm sure we all have some habits like that.

nocman• 11 years ago

Don't feel too bad. I didn't know until reading this that sending the output from ls somewhere other than stdout would cause the output to be one-item-per-line either, and I've been using Unix and Linux platforms for a very long time.

If I wanted that behavior, I would have typed 'ls -1' also.

jff• 11 years ago

See today's submission https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10198353, where the PDF discusses precisely that case and why it's bad.

jewel• 11 years ago

The isatty(3) system call will let you know if STDOUT is a terminal.

There are two cases when you should definitely take advantage of isatty:

1) Your tool, by default, outputs in color.

2) Your tool, by default, outputs progress, which you keep on a single line by overwriting by outputting \r.

Both of these potentially annoying when your command is used in a script, and especially annoying if they are called from cron.

In other cases I agree with you, getting too creative violates the principle of least surprise.

nitrogen• 11 years ago

In the case of 1/color, I respectfully request that all toolmakers leave an option for forcing color even if STDOUT is not a tty, so I can, for example, use less -R on colorized logs and still get element highlighting.

thrownaway24242• 11 years ago

ls is bad but I nominate ps as the ultimate basket case.

bigger_cheese2• 11 years ago

Yes I'm a 'ps -ef' guy and my coworker uses 'ps aux' forget vim vs emacs this causes the most arguments.

billforsternz• 11 years ago

I know it is heresy, but what I really want is a switch to make ls more like dir from DOS/Windows.

Animats• 11 years ago

Early UNIX used "ls | mc", where "mc" was a program to put output in multiple columns. This is in keeping with the UNIX philosophy of one program, one job.

hollerith2• 11 years ago

I just wish Unix command-line tools would refrain from including terminal escape sequences in their output when invoked with TERM=dumb. Homebrew, wget and youtube-dl, I'm looking at you.

Although some of these tools can be persuaded to stop including escape sequences with the right switch, the right switch varies with the tool, and learning the right switch to use with a particular tool requires reading a large fraction of a very long man page. In contrast, 20 years ago, IIRC all command-line tools I used respected TERM=dumb.

Since isatty() was mentioned, let me point out that directing the output of the tools named above to a named pipe instead of a pseudo-TTY is not enough to get them to stop sending terminal escape sequences.

hackerboos• 11 years ago

These are Software engineering mostly and not CompSci.

mikerichards3• 11 years ago

Which is sadly, too often lacking at many universities.

rifung• 11 years ago

I suppose it's a philosophical argument more than anything, but I don't think it belongs universities. I don't think universities should be career schools, although I can see why others might think it should be since most people do go to school as a prerequisite to get a job nowadays.

serge2k6• 11 years ago

These aren't even software engineering classes.

xxpor2• 11 years ago

Bachelors is for real-world software engineering, Masters or PhD is where the serious CompSci should happen, IMO.

(I say this as someone with a bachelors only)

simonw• 11 years ago

I love "Unlearning Object-Oriented Programming".

iyn• 11 years ago

I've seen so much criticism of OOP, can somebody provide more details/valuable links why "OOP is bad"? Honest question.

wvenable• 11 years ago

Like all other wildly successful software paradigms, OOP is now out of favor.

Retra• 11 years ago

It tends to be excessively verbose and often requires detailed naming of temporary objects when solving stupid simple problems like pipelines and data aggregation. Inheritance is often not the best way to compose properties. People who learn only OOP tend to not see the obvious value and convenience of first-class functions.

cam-• 11 years ago

In real world business logic and modeling you have to work really hard to make it fit into an OO paradigm. It also gets hard to manage long term as your data structures kind of get stuck with all the restrictions that OO allows you to make. Javascript object literals are fantastic as they make data transfer objects simple, fast and not polluted by business logic. Once you get used to passing around DTOs that way then a functional style of programming becomes more useful. For the most part programming is getting data from one domain data model and then converting to another domain data model, OO doesn't really help there, and if anything is a hindrance. Unfortunately software engineers love to abstract to the nth degree so sometimes you get stuck with tight OO models of DTOs and transformation layers.

vezzy-fnord5• 11 years ago

The class-driven polymorphism/encapsulation/inheritance model of OO which is sugar over imperative programming has often been criticized: http://harmful.cat-v.org/software/OO_programming/

OO as the idea of late bound, dynamically dispatched objects that receive messages, retain state, maintain access and location transparency and optionally delegate to other objects... that's not really controversial, but also rarely done. Nevertheless, most great research operating systems have been object-oriented, and this is no coincidence.

cbd1984• 11 years ago

It's a way to keep doing all of the bad habits you learned from completely unstructured procedural code, including global state, but in a way which is marginally more encapsulated and therefore more likely to last longer than six months in the field, and might even survive maintenance.

It adds to this all of the extra oddness that object hierarchies bring, especially the oddness related to trying to force non-hierarchical concepts into a hierarchy. Mediate on whether an ellipse is a special case of a circle or vice-versa until you reach enlightenment, which is realizing that the question is stupid and that any situation which forces you to answer it is stupid.

TheDong• 11 years ago

I'm a fan of Yegge's colorful and fun to read narrative explaining the issue: http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2006/03/execution-in-kingdom...

Essentially, OO forces you to think of everything as an object. That pattern is valuable at times, but the way you think about something and the patterns you're familiar with intrinsically shape your approach and how you can solve it which can be a bad thing.

OO is not bad; it's merely bad to only use OO, to teach it as the only methodology in schools, to use it to the exclusion of all else. Like most things, OO is just one of many options and is not always the best one.

88e282102ae2e5b• 11 years ago

I really just feel it's because most people who use OOP end up increasing the complexity of their code and have no idea how to use it to make things simpler, safer and more reliable.

It was like a lightning had struck when I realized that if you did OOP in a certain way you could make guarantees that some mistakes would be impossible to make, and that whatever I had been doing for the past several years was not even remotely OOP, even though everything was in a class.

The reason I'm interested in learning functional programming is because it seems like it too holds the promise of eliminating errors entirely, if done well, perhaps not in a mutually exclusive way.

dagw3• 11 years ago

This is the video that really made me cut down on the use of OO in my own code.

http://pyvideo.org/video/880/stop-writing-classes

It's about python but applicable to most languages.

sklogic12• 11 years ago

http://www.stlport.org/resources/StepanovUSA.html

outsidetheparty• 11 years ago

Over the years I've come to believe that OOP is primarily an elaborate mechanism for keeping the lunatic in the next cubicle from shooting himself in your foot. Assuming the overall architecture is relatively sane, the lunatic can safely do whatever weird nonsense he like in the privacy of his own objects.

If all the developers on your team are sane, then OOP is just a bunch of unnecessarily verbose conceptual complexity.

(The unfortunate corollary, of course, is that the code from the lunatic in the next cubicle is just as likely to be your own code from six months ago)

jason_s• 11 years ago

Robot Odyssey!!!!!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robot_Odyssey

insaneirish2• 11 years ago

Can I add another one? How about "The Network Doesn't Work The Way You Think It Does: A Distributed Systems Survival Guide".

As someone who has spent a good chunk of their career building high performance networks and another chunk of it working closely with developers who care a lot about those networks, I'm constantly amazed at how little top tier graduates from well respected schools know about networks.

Relatively basic stuff, like what does your application's traffic look like on the wire, how an OS determines what to do with a packet, how latency affects applications, and many other things are completely foreign to way too many developers. I could go on and on, but given the connected nature of things today, it seems like a very overlooked area.

fr0styMatt22• 11 years ago

Closely related I think: breaking into software / hardware / networks. A course that has people doing basic and maybe not-so-basic exploits on real systems. Including attendance at a conference such as DEFCON.

Our future software engineers need to have security as a fundamental concern to software engineering and not as something that's an 'add-on'.

testaccount17• 11 years ago

I am a recent CS grad and I am constantly amazed by how little I know about networks. Do you have a favorite book or online resource on the subject?

jzwinck3• 11 years ago

One fun thing is to download Wireshark and look at the packets being sent in detail when you do common things like browse the internet or use FTP.

rayiner• 11 years ago

I'm a fan of lecture notes. http://www.cc.gatech.edu/~traynor/cs3251/f13/slides/

akandiah• 11 years ago

Computer Networks by Tanenbaum: http://www.amazon.com/Computer-Networks-Edition-Andrew-Tanen...

It's a classic.

yaur• 11 years ago

TCP/IP Illustrated is what I cut my teeth on back in the day. You will need to be able to read C to follow the code, which is mostly from the BSD TCP/IP stack IIRC.

spacecowboy_lon• 11 years ago

The CISCO press books for the CCNA course are fairly good.

I actually did the proper 4 semester CISCO academy course at night school a while back which should give you real hands on experience - one of the tests is the instructor breaks a system and you have to fix it

lordnacho• 11 years ago

I ended up doing the CCNA course just to figure out how networking works. I was designing a distributed trading system and I wanted to actually understand how things worked rather than just cargo culting a few commands and praying. There's just so many acronyms in the networking space it's hard to figure out without an overview.

Even with the CCNA course, you're still not going to know about stuff like security and firewalls on a deep level.

But get the textbooks and read through them.

ArkyBeagle• 11 years ago

This is probably complete overkill , but my favorite is still McDysan/Spohn "ATM Theory and Applications." The first few chapters before you dive into the details about ATM are a very good overview of all communications systems.

2muchcoffeeman2• 11 years ago

I know a few good developers that don't even know how a computer works. Everything is so abstracted you never really have to know.

toomuchtodo4• 11 years ago

As a devops/infrastructure guy, this drives me nuts. You abstract everything away, but then are shocked when you don't understand what's happening when the underlying layers fail or break down in unexpected places ways.

devnonymous• 11 years ago

You don't really have to know the internals but I personally think you ought to know the abstactions themselves at the very least. To be more specific, you need not know say the internals of your compiler but you ought to know how compilers in general work. Same with protocols, filesystems, OS {vm,scheduler} ...etc.

sklogic12• 11 years ago

A good developer must know at least about the standard latencies and about the memory hierarchy. Otherwise it is a really bad developer who is going to keep annoying the innocent users.

api2• 11 years ago

A thousand times yes. I've met tons of good programmers, even CS/CE Ph.Ds for whom networks and anything wire-releated is black magic beyond mortal understanding.

Not only does it prevent them from dealing with or writing such systems, but it's also a major contributor to clueless security FUD. It's not that there's nothing to be afraid of... it's that if you don't understand how networks work you are probably afraid of the wrong things.

serge2k6• 11 years ago

my school offered both networking and distributed systems courses, and it was a tiny school with an even smaller cs department.

The problem is getting practical experience in modern techniques.

hcrisp• 11 years ago

Network speeds I don't know about, but the book "High Performance Python" comes pretty close to the description of "CSCI 4020: Writing Fast Code in Slow Languages". Check it out!

irremediable• 11 years ago

Thanks for the tip. I've been exposed to Cython a little, but my experience was very ugly... will check this out.

karmakaze• 11 years ago

Awesome. I was just about to say I'd pay for CSCI 4020.

superuser2• 11 years ago

This is Networks and Distributed Systems at UChicago:

CMSC 23300. Networks and Distributed Systems. 100 Units. This course focuses on the principles and techniques used in the development of networked and distributed software. Topics include programming with sockets; concurrent programming; data link layer (Ethernet, packet switching, etc.); internet and routing protocols (UDP, TCP); and other commonly used network protocols and techniques. This is a project-oriented course in which students are required to develop software in C on a UNIX environment.

http://collegecatalog.uchicago.edu/thecollege/computerscienc...

The 3 major C programming assignments last year: an IRC server, a TCP stack, and a router.

Best course I've ever taken.

zachberger3• 11 years ago

I dug around and found the course projects: https://github.com/uchicago-cs/cmsc23300/wiki

serge2k6• 11 years ago

Should be considered a typical CS course.

grrowl• 11 years ago

Part of my bachelor of Software Engineering included calculating to the nanosecond the latency of networks from the kernel interrupt to the other side (including across copper, fibre, and waiting in RAM buffers along nodes on the way)

voltagex_5• 11 years ago

https://www.nsnam.org looks like a good idea, but my head is spinning from the first tutorials - I'd love a "network simulator" that could just replay pcap files. Do you think that programmers watching and understanding some of what's going on in a Wireshark session would help?

voltagex_5• 11 years ago

Also found via the course wiki - http://mininet.org/

solomatov6• 11 years ago

I think, another course should be CSCI 9000: How not to be opinionated jerk.

GFK_of_xmaspast• 11 years ago

Where are you gonna find faculty to teach that.

tsumnia4• 11 years ago

I think if you force CS students to take a few business courses (or MIS courses), it can help dissolve the 'opinionated jerk' [elitist] stereotype that can come from CS students. They see that software development is only a piece of the puzzle and while they'll never have to worry about handling insurance, someone who didn't spend classes learning code has learned this task for them.

ebiester3• 11 years ago

You must have had different business classes.

The one class I had with business majors, I was completely underwhelmed as to their capabilities. I was amazed at having an upper division course that had such atrocious writing and thinking skills.

WestCoastJustin• 11 years ago

How about "Building an End-to-End Software Solution - 101". Going through the entire development workflow (idea, design, prototype, beta release, delivery, and iteration). One of my good friends is currently going through school, but in the back of my head there is this nagging thought, that he will not learn what's needed for today's market.

ggchappell• 11 years ago

We have that in our CS program. We call it "Senior Capstone". I'm sure others have it, too.

Turing_Machine2• 11 years ago

Same here. We had to design and write a significant real-world application. You could suggest your own idea or take on a project that the profs had found through their connections with the business world. Either way, you had to convince the professors on the committee that it was worthy of receiving a full course's worth of credit (though most people wound up spending far more than that amount of time on it).

alashley• 11 years ago

We had that at my community college too, we worked along with an government organization to produce software for them. Unfortunately most of our coursework involved writing documentation and doing presentations, so the software side of things wasn't as useful as it should have been.

nightpool• 11 years ago

We definitely have this in our CS curriculum to—working in teams of 10-15 to design, prototype, refine, and ship a product.

girvo3• 11 years ago

The software engineering degrees here in Australia (not CS) have you do that a number of times. I wish I had studied it, but B.Sci in Maths/Chemistry and half a law degree was still quite enjoyable.

UnoriginalGuy2• 11 years ago

Going through the entire development workflow (idea, design, prototype, beta release, delivery, and iteration).

That sounds like what I was taught in school. Never used it. I'm just glad the waterfall model is dying.

It is kind of funny, me and all of my peers were required to do the whole requirements, design, implement, verification, etc thing. But nobody did, nobody.

Everyone did the same thing: Requirements for one small part, implement, verify, and then write the design document at the end to match the implementation. Repeat.

I'm really glad things like agile are here, not because they're magical solutions to all of life's problems, but because they're inherently compatible with how people ALREADY WORKED. Waterfall felt like a boat anchor, causing teams to get indefinitely stuck in the design phase (or to lie a bunch to effectively skip it entirely). Agile allows you to go away, get it 90% down, and then iterate, iterate, iterate until everyone is happy.

To be honest waterfall always felt like a programming methodology created by people who never programmed. It was like they took the method for building a bridge or a skyscraper, and applied it to software blindly. Agile methods feel like something designed by people who have actually programmed and know how they like to do it.

mbesto3• 11 years ago

I'm just glad the waterfall model is dying

To be fair, it's not.

To be honest waterfall always felt like a programming methodology created by people who never programmed.

And agile was created by people who don't understand that most organizations need specific software developed on a specific budget.

A majority of companies that I see that say they are doing agile are still doing waterfall.

PS - I'm a huge proponent of agile and the agile manifesto, but it's not a one size fits all methodology.

dasil003• 11 years ago

It's a methodology from when you had to schedule time for your program to run and at a minimum 24-72 hour turnaround on the smallest change. In that case it's worth taking extra time to verify things on paper and institute heavy practices to ensure correctness. Then you can just type "exec" in a terminal that completely changes the equation.

azernik2• 11 years ago

"Software Engineering" at Berkeley. The workload is really high, though.

zachberger3• 11 years ago

"Software Engineering" is actually offered as a degree at many institutions.. Focused more on the construction of quality software focusing on software design and development processes over how to code and analyze algorithms. I'd almost call it applied cs.

tripzilch3• 11 years ago

Oh god. We had that too. Course was called "Software Engineering". It was pretty much the most horrible thing I experienced in CS and for me sealed the deal: I was never ever going to be a software engineer. So glad when it was over and the next block was about actual science again.

In hindsight, I have to admit I did learn a useful thing or two.

(unfortunately those things are still only useful in software engineering)

spydum• 11 years ago

Automotive Metaphors and analogies for programmers

Seriously, why does every analogy have to be a car? Is it just the most complex system we can model in our heads?

Turing_Machine2• 11 years ago

Hey, sometimes it's a recipe, and sometimes it's a telephone system. :-)

bliti3• 11 years ago

CSCI 0666: Implementing Reverse Binary Trees on whiteboards.

CSCI 0123: Implementing Monads in COBOL

CSCI 0555: Successfully correcting internet commenters.

CSCI 0556: Nitpicking points made in CSCI 0555.

CSCI 0777: Introduction to twitter bot polynomial time algorithms with an emphasis on winning shitty contests.

CSCI 0911: Learning functional programming with Haskell.

CSCI 0912: How come up with uses for knowledge acquired in CSCI 0911.

andrewstuart2• 11 years ago

These are only needed to pass an interview at Google, where you will spend all day writing FizzBuzz algorithms.

bliti3• 11 years ago

    if comment.id % == 5:
        Println('Study computer science, sell advertising')

hired? :D

I'm waiting for a CSCI 0555 student to correct the obvious bug.

andrus• 11 years ago

CSCI 0911 and CSCI 0912 are real, though they go by CMSC-16100, CMSC-22311, and CS240h (and I'm sure more).

So do I pass CSCI 0555? ;-)

bliti3• 11 years ago

Sorry, CSCI 0123 is required for a passing grade. :) I'm going to get so much hate emails from Haskell people.

prostoalex• 11 years ago

CSCI 0666: Implementing Reverse Binary Trees on whiteboards.

Not of much practical use later in life, but an A in this course guarantees a technical interview pass with any major Silicon Valley company.

SamReidHughes3• 11 years ago

It's just a warmup question.

andrewstuart2• 11 years ago

How about "Programmer psychology: recognising and dealing with your own dogmatism through to diplomatically dealing with the dogmatism of other programmers."

louithethrid2• 11 years ago

If you cant profile it - it doesent exist.

matthewbauer• 11 years ago

CSCI 0201: Principles of Version Control

serge2k6• 11 years ago

So what do you teach for the rest of the semester after the first week?

That's the problem with teaching these things in university. They just aren't worth the time and money to teach at that level.

viraptor• 11 years ago

How about "How does development work in practice" that covers version control, debugging, documentation, dependencies, packaging. After that any project (all courses) involving more than 100 lines of code MUST be handed in as a repository that actually contains the development history, not a single-commit dump. Also installable as a proper language-specific package, rather than "put the path to the project in those two places, then run this script".

jnpatel• 11 years ago

Includes detailed study of knee-jerk criticism when exposed to unfamiliar systems.

This hits home.

ctdonath• 11 years ago

CSCI 1200: Debugging

Seriously. This should be a full subject addressed in detail, and early, unto itself. Instead it's typically a sink-or-swim byproduct of trying to pass any other science/engineering class.

girvo3• 11 years ago

Agreed. Debugging is an art and discipline in and of itself, and one that so many developers lack. In the last couple of years I've taken a great interest in learning to debug efficiently, and yet despite my best efforts most web devs I work with still rely on variations of "printf debugging". A shame really, considering the sheer depth and breadth of tools that are available these days, even in languages like PHP.

burkemw3• 11 years ago

I totally agree with "Debugging is an art and discipline in and of itself" for issues that are difficult to reproduce. With a reproduction, debugging should be straightforward for any engineer.

For reproducible issues, it's scientific method plug and chug for me: observe an interesting behavior, theorize about cause, test, rinse, repeat.

Unfortunately, I am too often amazed at the engineers that don't go through this exercise before asking for help.

toast0• 11 years ago

printf debugging isn't the best method, but it's almost universally applicable. I don't always get to pick which part of my stack is broken, so I need to be prepared to debug in any language, and I don't have time to learn all the debuggers (or the patience to use gdb for everything -- I've debugged user space php with gdb... it's much quicker when I can just error_log my way to the source of the problem).

cableshaft3• 11 years ago

The reason the 'printf debugging' might be so prevalent is the professors as well. I got told "printf debugging is incredibly useful, so in this class you can only use printf debugging to debug your program" in one of my classes. We also were to compile everything using Make and could only use Vi. It was still a good class, but maybe that's why so many students think they HAVE to debug with printf.

dpflan• 11 years ago

Udacity has a course on Software Debugging: https://www.udacity.com/course/software-debugging--cs259. I haven't taken it, but it seems to have positive reviews. Have any HNers taken this course?

ngneer• 11 years ago

This.

firebones• 11 years ago

Related to debugging and troubleshooting, I would assign Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and work through its applicability to software development. Robert Pirsig, (who I believe had a genius IQ and worked for a time as an IBM tech writer), hit on many topics that serve developers well. His ideas around values, rationality and gumption traps have served me well.

“The truth knocks on the door and you say, "Go away, I'm looking for the truth," and so it goes away. Puzzling.” ― Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values

Wildgoose• 11 years ago

My Pascal lecturer in 1984 recommended 2 books. The official "Findley & Watt" course book and "Zen & The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance". I loved it, but I suspect I was the only one who both bought it and read it.

cableshaft3• 11 years ago

It's been probably a good decade and a half since I read that book, and I remember enjoying it, but I don't remember anything being a specific parallel to debugging, necessarily (do you mean how he maintained his motorcycle, I guess?) Anything in particular stick out for you that might jog my memory?

hollerith2• 11 years ago

CSCI 1201: Designing software so that it is easy to test or at least easy to reproduce any bugs in it.

bwang29• 11 years ago

How about a "class" or some pre session on best practices of typing on the keyboard in the CS departments?

For year, I'm still struggling to type without looking at the keyboard and I make frequent typos which slow me down. Being able to type quickly and have a good habit of placing fingers on the keyboard seem to be an important exercise. A guideline to choose the right keyboard, setting up personal shortcut or customized keyboard layout for each developer might also be worth learning.

Crito• 11 years ago

Usually those exist.

anjanb• 11 years ago

there are so many online typing tutors that can help you with this : https://www.google.co.in/search?q=typing%20tutor

tsumnia4• 11 years ago

Interestingly enough, this semester, I've begun including images of programming code that I force my students to type out specifically to give them typing exercises. There's no errors, and they're variants of stuff from the books so they don't copy and paste from a PDF. My logic is that while CS is mental, typing the code is still a physical activity we use. Like any other physical activity, the best way to get better is to drill the motions until they become second nature.

While there ARE typing tutors, I haven't found any programming specific typing tutors. I think a normal typing tutor is nice, but since syntax requires so many symbols, typing English sentences only helps so much. I also think (still in the 'physical activity' mindset) developers can use these typing exercises are warm-up exercises. Just like a sport, you stretch and warm-up so you a loose and ready. Typing out basic for loops and functions can help in the same light.

kevan• 11 years ago

Have you checked out typing.io [0]?

[0] https://typing.io/

yakult• 11 years ago

How To Prevent Scope Creep Without Alienating Your Boss Or Other Important People

blt2• 11 years ago

That's a ph.d.-only "special topics seminar", still an unsolved problem under active research

hvidgaard5• 11 years ago

In my experience it's not that bad, but you have to speak in their language. An agreed spec and deadline is a contract, and now they want to get more for the same price. I'm sure they wouldn't let a customer do that, so they understand that if they want to change the content of the contract, they have to negotiate.

That of course require that you have a sensible manager/boss, that doesn't force it his way.

Tloewald4• 11 years ago

Unlearning Object Programming might include discussion of the legitimate uses of global variables, and how Singletons are just obfuscated and inconvenient globals.

princeb• 11 years ago

think I did "unlearning object oriented programming" in university - it was called "programming in matlab with other applied mathematicians"

jacobolus• 11 years ago

That’s more like “being reduced to tears” than “unlearning” per se.

crdoconnor2• 11 years ago

discussion of the legitimate uses of global variables

Short course, that one.

Tloewald4• 11 years ago

Module names are, effectively, global variables. The reason global namespace shouldn't be polluted is that it's so damn useful. Not using it for anything is like never driving your car to avoid wearing out your tires.

piyushpr1342• 11 years ago

How about 1. Version control systems and how to use them always 2. Practical introduction to sql and nosql databases 3. Database schema design along with practical projects 4. Introduction to HTTP 5. Introduction to Web frameworks 6. Introduction to mobile development 7. Mobile app design basics 8. How to clear job interviews

dredmorbius2• 11 years ago

There's theory and practice.

When I started with computers in the dark ages (mid 1980s), there might have been RCS and SCCS... Yes, SCCS actually dates to 1972. RCS from a decade later. CVS ... woah, that is also an 80s kid: 1986, wasn't something I encountered1until later. Ah, initial release 1990. Subversion came along and changed everything in 2000, mercurial in 2005. I remember some heated Hg, arch, and Git debates for a while.

Unfortunately, I've got (bad) habits from most of these stuck to different layers of my brain....

Databases may be going through similar revision (though you'll still get a fair bit of mileage from 5NF.

HTTP may or may not be due for major revisions given variously:

1. Calls for distributed Web.

2. Issues with presentation and form factor.

3. Conflicts between document and application presentation.

4. Privacy and security.

Web frameworks change too quickly to be worth teaching. Best learn general UI principles. Dittos mobile apps.

piyushpr1342• 11 years ago

See it is one thing that the tool you have been taught becomes obsolete and quite another that you are not even familiar with the concept of http, vcs, and sql. It is far more easier for somebody who knows mysql to understand and come upto speed on a postgres/mongodb than somebody who is not at all exposed to these concepts.

Moreover course curriculum needs to be updated every 2-3 years when such courses are taught to keep them relevant

ImNotAKompjoetr• 11 years ago

I got almost all these things at my school, shame a lot of the teachers were really bad at teaching and almost all of us learned everything from google... You could argue that if the curriculum didn't include these things we wouldn't have googled the stuff either, so I suppose my education wasn't all bad

gull• 11 years ago

How to program by listening to your intuitions, not logically.

xacaxulu• 11 years ago

Maybe just a CS program staffed entirely by people who've had real CS jobs outside of the academia bubble.

visarga• 11 years ago

You mean software engineering jobs?

bb0wn• 11 years ago

This would more aptly be titled 'Software Engineering Courses That Don't Exist, but Should.'

blt2• 11 years ago

It's not enough to fill a class, but I really wish school had taught me about linkers, dynamic libraries, and calling conventions. AKA "why must I use this old compiler to link against this old closed-source C++ library?"

Jach2• 11 years ago

Really this should have been part of your freshman C course. (Happily it was mine, like right at the beginning alongside Hello World.)

serge2k6• 11 years ago

ha, freshman C course. Good one.

My school switched to Java and graduated more than a couple people who don't really get C at all.

Should be taught in OS. Really, it should be taught in a practical sense in an OS lab.

stormbeard• 11 years ago

Seriously though, it's probably time to separate Computer Science and Software Engineering into different routes of study.

zatkin• 11 years ago

RIT already has done this.

zachberger3• 11 years ago

And CMU, ASU, Penn state, etc.

- signed RIT SE Grad

alexpersian• 11 years ago

Saint Cloud State is in the process of doing this.

dagw3• 11 years ago

Most schools I know of in Europe do this. Mainly Software Engineering is taught at engineering schools in close connection with other engineering departments and Computer Science is taught at universities in close connection with the math department.

ionised• 11 years ago

My former university (Manchester, UK) does this.

cableshaft3• 11 years ago

But then the hardcore Computer Science program would only get 10 students enrolled per year! Think of the poor Computer Science researchers that need to come up with new notation for their Pumping Lemmas!

smrtinsert• 11 years ago

COMP000 Your Job Isnt Only Fun Shit

jecjec• 11 years ago

How about:

-Mastering Git (/competitors)

-Refactoring

-Project Management

-History of consumer information technology

thinkingfish2• 11 years ago

CSCI 4035: Refactor Your Own Term Projects from Past Semesters

jboggan• 11 years ago

That's a rather brilliant idea. Including code review from your classmates.

xerophyte12932• 11 years ago

My Almameter seems to be doing that this year in their Design Patterns Course. The task is to find a large code base that desperately needs refactoring. I let a young friend use my old Final Year Project for this. Its scary how bad my code was when I graduated (never took Design Patterns) but at the same time, inspiring to see how far I have come since then

dagw3• 11 years ago

I had one course where one of the major projects was to add a significant feature to the major project you wrote for the last course.

thinkingfish2• 11 years ago

CSCI 3350: Debugging- Beyond Print

CSCI 4600: When Big-O Complexity Becomes a Lie and Why

smegel• 11 years ago

CSCI 2550: Software complexity and the art of Keeping It Simple.

dave_chenell• 11 years ago

this is so good

kevindeasis• 11 years ago

CSCI 099: How to apply what you learned in comp sci.

thetruthseeker1• 11 years ago

I am a software engineer, I have a grad school degree in CS with many years of experience in the industry. One thing I often noticed was many people break some key computer science concepts while on the goal to achieve some minor usability improvements or some other minor goal such as code reuse.

There was one instance where in a multiprocess environment, one of the engineers wrote some library to access a database table and read its contents. In the process he/she maintained a cache of it in memory. Then somebody else decided to use that convenience library/methods in a different process and so on.., essentially cache coherence problems were left unsolved and when I brought this to the attention of people they shrugged it off saying when they see a problem they might handle it - which may be fine, but seemed like some key computer science concepts were overlooked in the goal to achieve software reuse (here reuse of existing accessor/cache code to the database)

I have seen design choices that cause race conditions or non-determinstic behavior, following some patterns or cargo cult programming because something is an industry trend etc.

kriro• 11 years ago

CSCI 3300 kind of exists in human computer interaction.

fizixer• 11 years ago

Okay time to upset people:

Dear 'All CS Departments of the World':

Please stop fooling your students in the 'Intro to Algorithms' class, and just rename it to 'Intro to Combinatorial Algorithms'. Because that's what you teach, and you completely ignore the arguably bigger area of 'Intro to Numerical Algorithms'. Numerical Algorithms, that are not only the basis of pretty much every branch of computational science (comp. physics, comp. chemistry, comp. biology, comp. civil engineering, comp. mechanical eng., comp. electrical eng., comp economics, comp. statistics, and on and on and on), but it's also one of the weakest link for a CS graduate to transition to Machine Learning and Data Science.

Or you could keep the course title, but upgrade the class, by teaching 50% of it as 'Algorithms and Data Structures', and 50% as 'Numerical Methods and Scientific Computing'.

Unrelated to above but relevant to the thread: Allen Downey and his team at Olin College are doing things worth looking into. (His Google techtalk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iZuhWo0Nv7o)

tonyarkles• 11 years ago

Woah woah woah, are you suggesting that computer science classes should teach people how to compute things?! That's ridiculous! :D

pjmlp2• 11 years ago

In Portugal they do.

There is hardly any pure CS like it appears to be the US case.

All Informatics degrees are actually a mix of CS and Software Engineering.

For pure theoretical CS one needs to go for a Maths degree with focus on computation (after the third year).

EDIT: Typo the => be

zenir• 11 years ago

That's what the numerics course is for, at least at my university

2muchcoffeeman2• 11 years ago

I had to get a physics degree to get exposure to such topics.

tripzilch3• 11 years ago

We did learn both. But Algorithms was first-year stuff and Numerical Math was .. 3rd or 4th I think.

I agree that numerical computing algorithms are indeed very important topics. I was very excited when I learned about them (then took Numerical Math 2, and finally met my match, was above my ability to learn in one block).

I do think that it was a good idea to teach Algorithms first, though. I don't think I would have appreciated Numerical Math as much if I had taken it in my first year, but Algorithms was pretty accessible, cool, and precisely the sort of thing I had imagined studying Computer Science to be like.

cLeEOGPw• 11 years ago

These should exist if universities had a goal of producing not scientists, but workers.

msoad• 11 years ago

Where I come from Software Engineering and Computer Science are two different paths.

FrankenPC• 11 years ago

Reminds me of a question a help desk person asked me about 20 years ago. They were having all kinds of problems printing word docs from this new windows 95 PC. I was busy at the time so rather than educate them on the nature of WYSIWYG I just told them to update/repair the graphics driver. It worked and they thought I was a god.

It's hard to create a course on the interconnections of everything. The best course I ever took was a Cisco IOS programming course. That included protocol analysis, debugging routers, switches, etc. I'm not a network layer programmer. But what I learned about how everything works together has helped me solve complex problems ranging from Kerberos authentication issues to finding duplicate DHCP servers on the same network. Without this knowledge, I would have to hire experts and waste a ton of time and money to get to the end goal which is a functioning product.

pjtr• 11 years ago

CSCI 0001 'RTFM & Learning simple facts yourself outside a CS course'

zyxley2• 11 years ago

I'd like to suggest a course in: how to argue with management about system or vendor implementations that you know will affect both future development time and user experience within your company.

tonyedgecombe• 11 years ago

Absolutely, I spent quite a few years on the other side, implementing systems for a vendor. We rarely had technical problems but usually encountered some kind of management failure, from either side.

asgard1024• 11 years ago

Classical software studies? What about System 370, CP/CMS, IMS, CICS? There is so much that was forgotten.

alt_f4• 11 years ago

CSCI 2100: Learning how to hate on OOP

CSCI 3300: Stuff no one cares about anymore

CSCI 4020: Pretending to write fast code in slow languages

CSCI 2170: I know about command line tools !1!!@ So h4x0r

PSYC 4410: Trivia

Seriously, this article is garbage

2sk21• 11 years ago

No disagreements except that I might rename "Classical Software Studies" as "Software archeology"

notacoward• 11 years ago

CSCI 2020: How to Store Data

Discover the fascinating differences between fflush, fsync, and data actually hitting disk. Learn why single-byte writes are a dumb idea, and why accessing data through a cheap one-gigabit switch might not be as fast as accessing it locally. As preparation for being actual storage developers, students will be blamed for the professor's own mistakes, and for every problem that happens anywhere else in the system.

AnbeSivam• 11 years ago

I am interested in learning this. Are there any books/study_material available, that you recommend.

loaaa• 11 years ago

Another course should be network security for everyone

garfieldnate• 11 years ago

I would take that classical programs class in a heartbeat. That seems like something that could be organized online somewhere.

EugeneOZ• 11 years ago

"I'm so cool I'm going against the crowd" bullshit.

Computer science courses that don't exist, but should

Related Stories