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.

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.