My son just finished an undergrad CS degree at a major university and I don’t think he’d meet this pre req.
I’d love to hear what the author considers nontrivial but I’m going to guess it has something to do with pointers, and familiarity more generally with the memory model of C.
I took a few undergrad CS courses during some downtime recently and found them blindingly, disappointingly easy to the point where I found myself fading the (prestigious) school that created the material. They felt completely trivial, as did the assignments.
On the other hand, I'd be willing to entertain the argument that I've not yet written a non-trivial program in my ~10 years working.
Wow, that's somehow sad : - |
I used to work out of a space provided to my employer by a university, as part of their startup accelerator program
It was on-campus and there were students also in that space, so during lunch and breaks I got to know many of them
In my experience, students about to graduate from the CS program had near-zero tangible skills and lacked the ability to build basic applications, in any language.
This was in the USA, FWIW. I think our CS programs are pretty trash at most universities.
One of my current coworkers applied after graduating and failed the interview and was only able to pass after paying thousands to attend a coding bootcamp.
Also I'm fairly sure you can start a course like this even without matching the prereqs, it's just gonna be a bit harder, but university is all about challenging yourself...
No disrespect but that isn’t true. Touching the command line is required for sure.
1. Exclusive use of Windows. You couldn't submit binaries unless it was compiled with msvc.
2. Junior year was when we were first taught the shell. This was a major challenge for many as they didn't understand commands like `cd` or `dir`.
3. C was never taught, even in our OS course, it was all C++.
4. When working on my senior project with my team, one of my teammates asked if his code needed to compile (the IDE had riddled his code with red underlines for the many, many syntax errors)
5. Bonus: Git was never taught. When I suggested to a teammate that we collaborate on GitHub he instead emailed me his code.
Either way, the only way you're going to graduate knowing C programming is to realize it's something you want to do and spend a bit of your own time learning it.
And then they completely fail to teach concepts usable as a gigging coder.
I think if you ask the academy "what are you teaching young software engineering students?" the response would be something along the line of "We're teaching them knowledge and skills that will be useful for being a grad student."
It would be cool if there was an organized course teaching kids the basics of version control, what continuous integration and continuous deployment are, what agile methodologies are supposed to do (as opposed to "agile is whatever is in the JIRA manual"), the basics of logic programming -- you'll never use prolog but you'll be rewriting it in C++ or C# a couple of times, the basics of functional programming -- you'll never use lisp, but you'll be pretending function pointers are the same thing when you're writing that big C++ program, software project estimation, how to invert a binary tree -- you'll need to know this for a google interview and how to actually design data structures.
But they didn't teach C programming. I actually taught the Intro to C Programming class in the Continuing Education department.
It might be the equivalent of a chemistry department saying "We'll teach you how not to blow yourself up in the Organic Chem Lab, but we won't teach you how to use a calculator."
But yeah. Seems every school is slightly different about where they want to draw that line. And most every school I've seen has more practical work than they did 40 years ago.
And to bang on my usual academic CS bugbear on HN: algorithms is one class. It might be the most important class, or the only class in the intersection of all CS experiences, but each person's experience includes like 15 other courses. Some, perhaps even most of those should be systems. And systems classes should include substantial C programming.
I didn't go to a university to learn anything about computers, fortunately.
The best env to complete SICP it's, paradoxically, a Unix like system written in C with an Scheme DSL to set up the system declarativelly.
Actually that’s exactly what Nicklaus Wirt did with Oberon.