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Comment by navanchauhan | Hacker News Reader

Most of the CS classes at my university have moved on to an online Jupyter environment with VS Code preinstalled. It lets students spawn an environment with all the required software for their class preinstalled.

E.g. For Computer System it spawns an environment with GDB pre-installed, while for Intro to AI it has PyTorch/Python3 pre-installed

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Having more grads coming out of university unprepared and expecting even more handholding (this time in the form of devcontainers in the cloud preconfigured and "ready", etc) really does not bode well for the health of our industry long term.

Sounds like normal progress. The bulk of the next generation will operate on a higher level abstraction that affords them more productivity with some of them specializing in the lower level stuff that used to be part and parcel of normal SWE duties but is now basement-dweller neckbeard voodoo. Grandpa complained that nobody knows how to set points ignition and jet the carburetor anymore, dad complains that you can't fix anything anymore, we will complain that kids these days never leave the pod and live in VR.

I lived on a boat with a 1972 Atomic 4. I had to set the points and jet the carb every so often. I truly enjoyed working on that thing. My car needed a freaking mechanic with a computer. It was nice to hear it start chugging incorrectly, pop the cover off, measure a few things, then start it back up. No technology required, just well timed explosions.

The situation is pretty bad. Some students don’t know how to Google properly because they know they can always reach out to TAs/CAs during office hours

But at the same time if everyone moves to devcontainers, will this skill even matter for the most part? Because the people who want to learn how to do something are going to do it regardless, and those who don’t might not need to worry about it

Who sets up the devcontainers?

Mom

Yours or mine?

Computer science is not exactly related to googling cryptic error messages, but IMO every undergrad CS major should have a tools/linux basics class of some kind

Yes but seems like most companies are moving to this remote dev container environment that you ssh into. Obviously the google skills are still important but there are plenty of other, more interesting, problems you can use to practice that.

I don't think that's even remotely true, I think you're in a bubble.

How is that different from using shared Unix boxes from back in the day? Using Containers doesn't mean not having access to the file system or console. You basically have the exact same experience as using vscode locally.

Online REPLs are great, but students especially in CS should know how to set up their environment.

I remember being a Junior Compsci student watching other students struggle to install the Java JDK on their Windows laptops (install JDK not JRE; configure PATH; install Eclipse; point it at the JDK). The professor had to come around and help them. I was the only student with a Mac and I had transferred from a community college where we had already learned Java in the first semester, including how to install and set up a local environment. All of this to say I feel like colleges should better prepare students to set up their local environments, although I see how useful the online REPL options are for getting started.

I went through a similar struggle in ~2005, seeing the word Tomcat still gives me PTSD from being left to ourselves to install Tomcat server on Windows XP.

Do you know how that works exactly or do you have a link where I can educate myself on the topic of using Python online in a sort-of-IDE? I‘m teaching Python fundamentals and don’t know how to sail around helping everyone with their individual problems with their machines while installing python or an ide.

I'll bet they're using this, that's exactly what it is designed for: https://tljh.jupyter.org/en/latest/

Alternatively, you could do something similar with Google Colab and a notebook you make to serve as a template.

https://www.colorado.edu/cs/students/computing-resources-stu...

Refer to the section titled “CSCI JupyterHub Coding Environment”

Alternatively, as another user pointed out: https://tljh.jupyter.org/en/latest/install/custom-server.htm...

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