Comment by stblack | Hacker News Reader

Comment by stblack | Hacker News Reader

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OP may already possess a master's degree, school-of-life alumnus.

But I "get" it. I've thought of doing this too.

I would add one criteria: I get to do the whole master's degree using Rust.

I'm sure this would narrow the field of schools.

I want a master's from a school that recognizes that it's effectively over for C++ and Java. At least it's completely over in my own mind. There's no way in hell I'm doing a master's degree where the school's obsolete syllabus dictates those legacy languages.

This stipulation might garner considerable traction. This quirky old guy, with more industry experience than anyone on faculty, will run advance reconnaissance for us, which is something he's been doing much longer than our typical master's students have been alive.

Because let's be honest guys: it's all about Rust going forward. If you feel otherwise I respect that view, but you haven't seen the shit I've seen.

I'd do a Rust-centric master's degree in a heartbeat, and I'm sure I'd love every minute of it.

I think you're looking at this from the wrong angle. A MSc is not supposed to teach you programming languages, because whatever you learn now will in any case be obsolete in 10 years. It's supposed to teach you fundamentals and how to think, which is timeless.

One of the most famous introductory CS courses in the world, MIT's "Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs", was for decades taught using a programming language called Scheme, a dialect of Lisp that's wildly different from any mainstream language and is used for basically nothing other than this course. This was partly intentional, since it does a great job of shocking teenage hacker wannabes out of their "I already know language X so I'm hot shit" complacency.

So tech is a lot like crossing a river hopping from rock to rock. You make these leaps, and you try (or mostly hope) these leaps lead to a great career.

At the beginning, you're a 20-something person. You mostly don't get to pick your steps, especially if you're in the employed-by-others track.

Standing in the river on my rock, at this advanced career stage, I'm certainly not looking to "learn programming languages". That was long ago.

Right now it's all about picking the next leap based on the conviction that it's going to be a great ride in the future, which is much closer to sunset for me than most in this forum.

Spoken like an experienced software engineer and certainly not the type of person who is well suited for a formal classroom environment. But take a peak inside any of the Fortune 500 and you would surely walk back your assertion that it's effectively over for C++ and Java, regardless of how useful or elegant Rust might be.

Yeah I should probably clarify, I'm not looking to compete in a Fortune 500 job placement situation. Where I'm at, Fortune 500 calls me.

I'd do a master's degree because I'm curious as hell, and having tons of fun learning surrounded by smart people is all I want to do now.

> There's no way in hell I'm doing a masters degree where the school's obsolete syllabus dictates those legacy languages

This applies not only to languages, but techniques, systems knowledge, documentation - everything about it really.

Part of the problem with selecting a degree on the basis of modernity is each course in the degree can be vastly different - some are up to date, others are 10 years out of date.

There's also a slight risk in doing a course in its first year, because the bugs haven't been ironed out.

I enjoy your hot take on Rust, but now I want to hear about what you've seen

Rust is fantastic for some problems, poor for others. If your alternative is C++, or you're doing something where you need to compile high performance code to wasm, go for it. If your alternative is Java and you're writing high level backend services, it might not be worth the cost, especially given the difficulty of finding / training experienced Rust programmers.

I would love to do this also, mostly because the Rust compiler probably has a master's degree worth of advice hidden in it and it would be helpful to have human guides to point out its wisdom.

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