MIT Missing Semester 2026

It's interesting to see that MIT is still like this. Canonically, there were no classes that taught programming per se: if you needed that, there were (often volunteer-taught) courses over IAP, the January Independent Activities Period, that would attempt to fill the gap - but you were still expected to pick it up on your own. I taught the Caffeinated Crash Course in C way back when. Good times.

Way back in the day, you did have a few programming classes especially outside of CS/EE given that it was perfectly reasonable for students to have no or little prior exposure to computers and programming. See FORTRAN coloring book. And, as you say, although I haven't dropped by since pre-COVID, there was as you say a smattering of stuff during IAP.

But my general sense based on some level of connections is you're expected to figure out a lot of, for lack of a better term, practicalities on your own. I don't think there's a lot of hand-holding in many cases--probably more so in some domains than others.

Yup. Back in my day there was 1.00, a Civil Engineering course, a pretty standard intro to programming in plain old C. I don't know if it still exists. There was nothing of that sort in EECS, though there are lots of IAP courses (which take place in January, before spring semester starts). IMO a month is about right to spend on (leisurely) picking up a programming language for fun. A friend and I learned APL that way.

Wasn't the SICP course a course in programming per se?

I feel like anyone with enough talent to get into MIT will have no problem picking up a programming language in a month or two on their own. Heck there are freshmen there who write programming languages for fun

During my time there (late 2000s) there was a Software Lab (6.170) that focused on programming fundamentals and culminated in a four-person, month-or-so long project. At least at the time, it was one of the more notorious courses in terms of time investment. It was common for people to live like monks during project time.

Unfortunately I heard that class was retired and there was no direct replacement, which is a shame. It was an excellent crash course in shipping.

In 2004 or so, 1.00 was an intro to Java course. I took it very cynically to pad out my units; I was a course 6 senior at the time. I got side-eyed by TAs a lot.

Project courses were pretty notorious. I had a few. 2.70 (which I think is a different number now) in mechanical engineering was a HUGE time sink. [For others: was a design challenge competition with a live context.] Did another all-terrain vehicle competition in grad school which was probably an even bigger time sink.

There was this one grad class taught by a professor who was also a capable programmer, and the class incidentally used this one programming language that many grad students wanted to learn.

So the word on the street was that his was a good class to take if you wanted a chance to learn the programming language. (Because you have only so much time in the day to allocate to labs.)

And rumor was also not to say to the professor that you want to learn that language, because word had gotten back to him about the off-label draw of his class to many, and he didn't like it.

i've often marvelled that hardly anybody on the MIT CS faculty has ever considered RDBMS / SQL / Codd-Date / relational model worthy of pedagogical consideration. you might cover some crud when surveying semaphores and mutexes, but actually learn SQL? nope.

I think that assumes a base level of programming knowledge in the generic which may be a reasonable assumption in this day and age if you're applying to MIT/Stanford/etc. It wasn't going back a decade or two but may be today. Perhaps if you've never written a program, you're just not a candidate for some undergraduate programs today whatever your other talents.

when I took 1.00 it was FORTRAN IV on IBM 370... with actual punchcards, batch.

when i took 6.170 it was CLU. it was 15 units because of lab, but yeah, time sink.

you are allowed to say the language name now, tho right? or is he still prowling about?