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Comment by superdavid | Hacker News Reader

Two major problems I see with people straight out of their course:

1. They've never heard of source control, let alone understand why or how it should be used.

2. They know exactly the frameworks they've been shown during their courses, and think that anything else is either completely foreign and useless, or needs to be dived into head-first, rather than seeing any framework as just another tool to be used based on first principles. (Replace "framework" with "language" and you get the same idea on a different scale.)

Maybe these comments are specific to Australian courses?

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As someone not too far out of coursework in the US -- neither I nor most of my classmates didn't use source control. For most homework assignments and projects it just wasn't a necessity. You were working with so few people and just sorta ground it out. Setting up/using version control wasn't worth the frustration and time. Had it been required and assignments were turned in by checking in our final version, then it would be second nature.

I wonder if the framework/language thing is more just a lack of experience in using new things without jumping in head first. I still have some of that. However, it was made very clear that first principles should always be used.

"Setting up/using version control wasn't worth the frustration and time."

I think the onslaught of very usable distributed source control systems with cheap and easy local repositories should make this a non-issue. I wish I had known about hg or git when I was in school - a simple repository per class/project would have alleviated a few pain points that weren't severe enough to be worth with the hassle of setting up a subversion repository.

I agree with you just at least at my school we didn't have it. I have a friend who works in the CS department now (and is one heckuva lecturer) that I'm going to mention it to.

I still don't know much about version control but perhaps a wrapper might be a good open source project or something.

Yes, and then they learn all about source control. It's really not that hard and is pretty easy to learn. Hence why you don't need to pay someone to teach it to you.

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