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Comment by mbrubeck | Hacker News Reader

My best CS professors would write code on-screen during lectures (usually in a REPL, or sometimes an IDE).

The great thing about watching them coding "live" is that you can see into their thought processes: which mistakes they make, how they figure out the mistakes and recover from them, exploratory code they write and throw away, the order they do things, how they evolve simple examples into complex programs. You don't get any of that from just seeing the finished product.

It's also great for picking up mundane practical tips, like tab completion, GNU screen, shell history, and how to quickly look up documentation.

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Out of my four years of college maybe one professor coded on-screen in front of us, and it was during one of the earlier classes. It's not that I don't appreciate or respect the traditional CS study, but as a programmer, how else are you really going to learn, than to watch a master at his craft?

As I sit here in my last semester implementing a few chosen functions of a small but complete RDBMS for my databases class (i.e. most of the code was written, we just had to fill in stuff relating to a certain topic (buffer management, heap files, etc.)), it makes me wish that I would have seen how the whole system was developed from the first thought processes to the final debugging. That would have been a much better learning experience.

Well I think the issue might stem from the fact that professors in university might not be masters of the craft of coding. I am sure they lost a lot of that mastery while researching their theoretical distertations and what not.

Many who show a mastery in coding are working on the next-big-thing and not furthering their theoretical knowledge.

This is just my thoughts, however. I really have no experience in learning to code in university (2 semesters of intro ECE).

I would say that some of my professors are quite talented programmers. That or the software they use in class has been extensively worked on by many people (including grad students) for years and they have put little into it. Who knows :)

I completely disagree. At least at Northwestern, the systems people know their stuff. You may be right about the theory people, though.

Yes, yes, yes. My favorite programming instructor would often code in front of the class on a projector. Like you I learned a bunch of little tricks, and it also built confidence. If he can write an AVL tree in front of my eyes in an hour then man, it can't be that hard.

I tried this when I taught a programming languages course a couple years ago. I thought it went well enough, but to prevent wasting too much time in class, you should rehearse.

During office hours and personal consultation I would also do live coding with students, but that wasn't rehearsed. In some cases it went really well, in others, it didn't (usually because something would just take too long -- or maybe because it was Scheme). Still, I enjoyed it and I know at least some of the students did.

Consider yourself lucky, I graduated last December and never had the fortune to see any of my professors code on-screen during lectures. It would have been nice for a professor to code on-screen to see their thought processes, given that I started college with little programming experience. Even if I had programming experience coming in, it would have been nice to see somebody else's perspective.

Maybe this should start becoming a requirement of the instructor?

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