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MIT Missing Semester 2026

(missing.csail.mit.edu)
91 points vismit2000 | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.195s | source
1. alexpotato ◴[] No.46277172[source]
I was an undergrad at Rutgers in the late 1990s as they transitioned from teaching Pascal to Java for the introductory CS classes.

The lectures were primarily about algorithms, basic data structures etc and the extra "labs", taught by Teaching Assistants, was almost always for reviewing the lecture notes with a focus on answering questions.

At no point was there any discussion around "hey, here is a good way to design, write and test a program in a compiled language". My prior experience was with BASIC so just figuring out how to compile a program was a skill to pick up. I thankfully picked it up quickly but others struggled.

Another thing I saw often was people writing ENTIRE programs and then trying to compile them and getting "you have 500 compilation errors". I never wrote programs this way, I was more "write a couple lines, compile, see what happens etc" but it always struck me that even just suggesting that option in class would have helped a lot of folks.

(This being HN, I'm sure some people will say that students figuring this stuff out on their own helps weed out non-serious people but I still don't 100% buy that argument)