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> I do not know many others who implemented something like that.

the school I did in france, ENSEIRB-MATMECA, started with three weeks where you only learn shell commands, emacs, LaTeX etc before doing anything else. Here are the slides (in french sorry, although they all have useful reference cards at the end):

- intro: http://mfaverge.vvv.enseirb-matmeca.fr/wordpress/wp-content/...

- unix, shell: https://cours-mf.gitlabpages.inria.fr/if104/docs/01-unix.pdf

- emacs: https://cours-mf.gitlabpages.inria.fr/if104/docs/02-emacs.pd...

- latex: https://mfaverge.vvv.enseirb-matmeca.fr/wordpress/wp-content...

- "advanced" shell scripting: https://cours-mf.gitlabpages.inria.fr/if104/docs/05-scripts....

LaTeX? Is this a dual math-cs program?

We had plenty of math classes in CS

I find this comment a bit odd. I teach CS and our students are required to use LaTeX for everything they hand in (internship report, project work, BA thesis). We also publish everything using LaTeX if possible. There's some conferences which use Word templates (shudder) but mostly it's LaTeX.

Citations and bibliography management are easy, it's super easy to switch from IEEE to Harvard or whatever and as soon as you have diagrams, graphs, tables or formulas it's a no brainer.

Pretty curious why you associate LaTeX with "math only". AFAIK it's absolutely standard to use it in CS. It's also quite easy these days. We provide templates for the students and they usually use Overleaf so there's very little hassle with setting up the entire environment.

Ah, that makes sense. The reason is that I was a math major and now doing programming, have lamented my LaTeX being utterly useless; the only thing I use it for is (perhaps somewhat ironically) my resume document, and I've forgotten so much that I don't even list it on my resume (if I even thought it was relevant).

But I had not considered that during the degree program itself, you will lose LaTeX quite frequently, which of course does make sense.

> have lamented my LaTeX being utterly useless

ConTeXt integrates Lua. KeenWrite[0] is my text editor that converts Markdown to XHTML then pipes that XML document into ConTeXt for typesetting[1]. ConTeXt does an amazing job of keeping presentation logic separated from the content. Meaning, once you've created a theme template, it's easy to pick it back up to create new ones.

There's a video series showing how to use KeenWrite.[2]

[0]: https://github.com/DaveJarvis/keenwrite

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qNbGSiRzx-0

[2]: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLB-WIt1cZYLm1MMx2FBG9...

Sphinx, asciidoc, mkdocs etc more accessible these days.

Interesting, we never used LaTeX at all in our CS program. We also didn't have very many papers to write in our CS program anyway, most were coding or proofs which we could use regular Google Docs with their math support, or do it by hand.

Back in the 90's, I'd write all my papers in LaTeX, just to avoid using Windows and Word.

I did this in the noughties, and I was a psychologist ;) Some ideas never die I guess.

LaTeX is also heavily used in Physics.

LaTeX was written by a famous computer scientist to write a computer science book.

Yes, mathematicians love it. But computer scientists were first there.

Interesting, do you think Lamport doesn't think of himself also as a mathematician? How about Knuth?

Both do a lot of mathematics. When they got into computers, mathematics was the standard route in.

All of their most famous work is in computer science.

Maybe a useful skill but it's not a CS skill so it's slightly odd to teach it. Same with Emacs tbh. Students could easily use VSCode (and it would probably be better for a CS class).

I always laugh abit about this, the purists are just insane, yes you can do things in one way forever but you dont have to.

Thank you for the links... I actually read enough French to get by, so those are great to look at for more ideas.

Taking a quick look at the Emacs PDF, I learned that the french word for 'buffer' is tampon!

Note that this is not part of the CS curriculum at MIT. It's a series of classes during Independent Activities Period in January which is mostly unstructured time when students can do or not do any activities that catch their fancy. It works well for this sort of thing but students also do a ton of stuff that isn't especially academically-related.

I do know that, I was trying to implement it as part of a go at your own pace online course, but that still requires approval from the uni.

Thank you for making the point about accreditation, it's sort of a pet peeve of mine. I taught "intro to C++" last year at the Harrisburg campus of PSU. The students were a mix of non-CS majors who didn't know what a file was, a handful of students who already knew how to program and a bunch in the middle.

Re: accreditation... the admin is very reluctant to change anything about the courses. Even specific textbooks had to be recommended (I was warned for suggesting in the syllabus that the textbook wasn't needed). Seemed a little more strict than teaching mathematics, which I did in graduate school.

Re: kids these days... a significant portion didn't understand the concept of a file. I blame apps and the cloud (funny because I now work in cloud storage). I ended up writing my own pre-cursor doc to the "missing semester". It was challenge to get a student from not understanding the filesystem to having some sort of understanding of linear search and pointers. (If you're interested: https://www.dropbox.com/s/jar1r0l5vdgspcl/basics.pdf?dl=0)

I tried to stress, especially to the non-majors, that this "missing" stuff was perhaps the most important thing they could learn. That, and how to properly google/search for things. I would experiment and try to re-word homework questions so that interesting StackOverflow answers appeared in search results.

C++ needs a “missing semester” around tooling. Most material I see focus on the core language but leave out setting up build systems, package management, clang tidy, testing etc.

How do you do package management in C/C++?

I have only used pip, cargo, npm (well yarn and pnpm mostly) and composer.

Big off putting aspect of learning C/C++ is that I can’t grok how shared libraries work very well

A mix of actual package managers, distro packages and just cloning the library into a 3rd_party folder in your project

Yeah, the whole aspect of teaching C++ to beginners is fraught with tooling issues. That school is moving to Python (years after main campus switched)... but I'm not sure how I feel about that since I spent a lot of time talking about memory layout.

I ended up suggesting those who don't know how to setup a tool chain use VS Code. Not out of any particular affinity for it, but because of the good documentation covering Windows, Linux and macOS.

> I would experiment and try to re-word homework questions so that interesting StackOverflow answers appeared in search results.

That's a really interesting pedagogical approach, I like it a lot.

I also told them this, to encourage searching.

Though I hate Chegg and the like with a passion, since this sort of thing takes a lot of work (over the course of teaching same class a few times) and then w/ Chegg you immediately find the answers.

This “MIT Course” was taught by grad students because they felt the actual course work left this out.

So when you say it’s a shame your uni doesn’t teach this, well, that’s what these grad students were saying as well. Perhaps the students could seize the initiative at your institution as well?

I might have to get a separate group to do it, like the ACM students. If I suggest it, even as an online sort of thing, it gets cut down. All of the sudden, it can not be "something we support" that is not "part of the curriculum".

We're trying to implement exactly this. I assign the MIT missing semester materials in my sophomore systems programming course, and we do all of our assignments using a CLI, C, GCC, and Git. Prior to my course, the students know only Java and IDE programming.

One problem we have is that the prereq chain for our courses is very long, so adding another course as a pre-req to all others lengthens that chain.

The MIT course offers probably too much info for our purposes, or at least info students don't need preloaded. Just basic CLI and basic Git clone/fork/pull/push are enough for up to probably Junior year. The problem is that the intro courses are so sanitized that students aren't even getting basic CLI until Sophomore year, which means by the time they graduate, they're behind where they should be imo.

This "class" was run by our CS library computer lab and was something your TA might push you to attend, but not part of the formal curriculum. That worked around some of the admin nonsense but still got help to motivated students.

It would seem this would be the perfect kind of class for online learning. Perhaps even as a wiki to crowd source helpful contributions. Most learning doesn't even have to be directed, but just point students in the right direction. This is a ripe area to find ways to better facilitate individual initiative, because a moderate level of effort yields tremendous reward. Plus, you can easily determine if you are doing it right.

Same in another school (EPITA).

You start with 2 weeks of only Linux C + POSIX shell, and during this you're only allowed to use i3 + vim/emacs.

We had this class, Unix, in freshman year (VT). This isn't normal?

"Universities were pressured into lowering credits to grad"

Uni's are requiring more generals, especially humanities. The problem isn't credit requirements, it's accreditation, marketing, and politics.