Re:We're Not Innovating, We're Just Forgetting Slower
by WillAdams on Friday July 04, 2025 @01:11PM
(#44466211)
Time was that this sort of thing was covered in courses such as:
https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/6-001-structure-and-interpretati...
but they've since switched to Python for reasons:
Re:We're Not Innovating, We're Just Forgetting Slower
by bee_rider on Friday July 04, 2025 @07:41PM
(#44468916)
I think you can teach this sort of class, in Python. Just using the basic syntax of Python, which is essentially pseudocode. The main danger, I think, is that it would involve doing lots of things in a non-pythonic way, which could confuse the students if they went on to write Python for real.
Re:We're Not Innovating, We're Just Forgetting Slower
by jjmarr on Saturday July 05, 2025 @02:42AM
(#44470588)
We do basic C, basic-medium Java, Python for signals analysis, and somewhat advanced design patterns. Tons of UML.
The misses remind me of technical debt vs shiny features. I wrote embedded assembly and did a bunch of labs on them. But due to time constraints and difficulty, I didn't go into much detail on interrupt-based programming. And our OS course focused more on rote memorization of concepts such as locks/mutexes/semaphores/deadlock avoidance algorithms/memory management.
But there's little detail on why I might use Linux syscalls over libc.
* the EE’s need to learn matlab or numpy, to use as a tool
* so do the computer engineering students, probably
* the computer engineering students also need to learn low level stuff, because they might reasonably end up writing drivers or embedded code
* separating out what should be in which classes is kind of tricky; keeping in mind that the students don’t necessarily know anything about programming at all, you probably need some kind of “intro to the general idea of programming” class
* realistically when they start the program they don’t know much about what the jobs look like, so it is good if they are able to switch paths, for the first couple years
* realistically a lot of people just want to get a stem degree and then go be a programmer anyway