An MIT Education Opens Doors

[dmaze]

I've heard a rant a couple of times -- around work, even -- along the lines of "why can't schools like MIT teach CS majors how to write code?" There are a couple of directions this goes. One is from interviewing too many people who did a "compiler" doctorate, and so they've spent the past six years doing type systems in ML. Another comes out of interviewing recent grads and expecting them to know C++/Python/Ruby/... and discovering that they only know Java and Scheme. "Shouldn't they have learned some real languages?"

I think the thing MIT needs to teach (not that I have any idea how to teach it) is how to learn a programming language. On some level every programming language is like Scheme or Java; perhaps it has explicit pointers (C/C++) or a stronger type system (Haskell) or is purely stack-based (PostScript) but none of these are fundamentally different. Maybe one thing that would be interesting is a 6-unit programming language overview? Spend a month on C, and a couple of weeks in Haskell/ML land, and then say "right, now here's Python and it's just like these other languages; here's Visual Basic and it's just like these other languages."

There should also be a little encouragement for side projects. If you want to learn how databases work, or how to write Makefiles, an actual project with some direction could provide inspiration. I don't know how many people graduate without taking any real programming classes besides 6.001, 6.170, and 6.034. Perhaps SIPB could produce one-sheets that say "hey, you could use MySQL and Python and the Census TIGER data to make your own maps!" or "hey, you could build Web pages using XSLT!" and provide support/hints. It's a thought.

Comments

[iabervon.livejournal.com]

Personally, I think 6.170 should be in C, or at least start in C, because you can't really teach the fundamentals of what is going on with OOP in a language which handles all of the fundamentals for you, and OOP in Scheme isn't the same (since Scheme doesn't have any static typing, so method tables don't make sense). Since Java (or CLU) takes care of implementing inheritance and interfaces, it's hard for someone who knows only Java to pick up C (to the extent of being able to do complex programs), because they don't know how Java does the things they rely on.

I'd also be pleased if the courses using microcontrollers switched to using gcc to compile C for avr, because it's completely standard C (with an obviously limited standard library).

Aside from that, the main part of learning new languages is really finding out their weird quirks: syntax errors can't be detected until they're reached, because symbols can be added to scopes at any time; NULL isn't equal to itself; allocating a new object is faster on the whole than modifying and reusing an old object; you need to escape things an implausible number of times.

Of course, the languages I've been asked to know for jobs are: C++ (back when C++ was a completely different language from what it is now), Scheme, Java, Haskell (which I didn't know), C (bit of C++, but not using any significant language features), Java again, C for microcontrollers and otherwise, and Java again. So my impression of real languages is Java, C, and maybe Scheme and Haskell.