Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!bloom-beacon!athena.mit.edu!crcraig
From: crcraig@athena.mit.edu (Christopher R Craig)
Newsgroups: comp.edu
Subject: Re: Which language to teach first?
Message-ID: <13471@bloom-beacon.MIT.EDU>
Date: 14 Aug 89 05:37:18 GMT
References: <4218@portia.Stanford.EDU> <4200022@m.cs.uiuc.edu> <13419@bloom-beacon.MIT.EDU> <24691@joyce.istc.sri.com>
Sender: daemon@bloom-beacon.MIT.EDU
Reply-To: crcraig@athena.mit.edu (Christopher R Craig)
Organization: Massachusetts Institute of Technology
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In article <24691@joyce.istc.sri.com> gds@spam.istc.sri.com (Greg Skinner) writes:
>Other people have probably posted on this in the past, but frankly I
>thought 6.035 that semester was a nightmare (and not just because CLU
>was required -- in fact, I rather liked programming in it).  I believe
>the teaching staff was just as unprepared to cope with a compiler lab
>as the students were to take it.  There were many complex
>administrative problems that cropped up during the course, such as
>many students dropping forcing the lab groups to be rearranged,
>overloaded computer facilities, insufficient staffing, conflicts with
>other subjects, etc.  They took pity on us and allowed us to switch to
>pass/fail if we wished.

Heck, I just thought it was plain *hard*.  The logistical problems
were the least of my worries, although the load on Deep-Thought (the
TOPS20 machine) was still lousy.  They moved it to Project Athena now,
so it's a lot better.  What I thought was hard was the combination of
rather difficult theoretical material (parsing and error handling
esp.) combined with a lot of non-trivial programming in a nominally
12-unit course.  I'm glad I took it, 'cause now I sort of know what
goes on inside a compiler, but it was tough.

>I don't know what MIT's undergraduate CS curriculum these days is, but
>the last time I looked you could take 5 courses either using AI tools
>or covering AI concepts (Abelson & Sussman, AI, problem-solving
>paradigms, machine vision, and robot manipulation), as opposed to one
>in operating systems, one in compilers, one in computer architecture,
>none in databases, and none in numerical analysis.  There is a
>definite bias towards AI, and perhaps not enough towards other parts
>of CS.

Ok, maybe the curriculum *can* be biased toward AI, but it doesn't
have to be.  Except for the first 2 (and I don't think Abelson &
Sussman is AI), all the rest are restricted electives that you don't
have to take.  I know of very few people who took any of the latter 3;
most take either the probability course or the algorithms course.
There are also plenty of other classes around to take.  One of the
more interesting ones I took was 6.313 (Contemporary Computer Design),
taught by Tom Knight.  I'm willing to bet that's as good an undergrad
course in computer architecture as there is at most schools.

If MIT is biased toward anything, it's toward producing CS theorists.
They don't concentrate on producing software engineers.

----------------------------------------
Chris Craig                      MIT '89
crcraig@athena.mit.edu