3/16/2026 at 8:00:14 AM
So much of practical CS is abiding by standards created by solo programmers in the past.My university frowned on any industry-related classes (i.e. teaching software engineering tools vs. theoretical CS), but I was fortunate enough to know a passionate grad student who created a 1-credit seminar course on this exact topic.
This course covered CLIs/git/Unix/shell/IDEs/vim/emacs/regex/etc. and, although I had experience with Linux/git already, was invaluable to my early education (and adoption of Vim!).
It makes sense that this isn't a core topic, as a CS education should be as pure as possible, but when you're learning/building, you're forced to live within an operating system and architecture that are built on decades of trade-offs and technical debt.
by jumploops
3/16/2026 at 1:04:22 PM
Sounds like MIT's missing semester https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46273762by loughnane
3/16/2026 at 10:43:52 AM
Universities consider themselves pure and isolated from lowly industry.Industry demands specifically university degrees to gatekeep positions.
And then we leave teenagers to figure out the puzzle by themselves. I think it's a disservice to the youth.
by kace91
3/16/2026 at 12:13:03 PM
Universities produce research, and students; Students produce industry, and the body politic; Industry and polity produce university funding.A cycle I like to call, the "ring-bugger."
I'm not saying it's right, or acceptable, or particularly moral… But I agree that by obscuring the facts, we only serve to confound the decent and good-willed of our students.
Edit: derp.
by someprick
3/16/2026 at 2:59:17 PM
While I have my issues with the system, many Soviet-controlled countries implemented a two-tier higher education system that solved this by having one tier be focused on practical subjects and the other on theoretical ones.by Pay08
3/16/2026 at 6:53:53 PM
Britain used to have this too. Sadly it was strangled to death by the UK class system, but the replacement didnt help.Once upon a time the white collar track was to go to University. One of the old ones if your class situation was pushing you towards executive roles in the Civil Service or banking or some big corporation. One of the newer, redbrick ones if your horizon was more like running a textile mill in the North. You were trained to think and had a fairly Great Books style of curriculum.
For the people who needed advanced education to keep the electric grokulator working, there were polytechnics. People came out of here with practical skills. In some areas, like mathematics, there would have been overlap between University and Polytechnic courses.
Then there were technical colleges where working class people could get skills to help them in their jobs, like rebuilding engines or CNC machining.
Then, people got antsy that university was so elite and only 5% of highschoolers were going. why not let polys be universities? After all, we need to keep up in a global economy. And so there was a massive gold rush and places that had no business or capability became A University overnight.
But...Brits being how they are, they still stratified themselves into class layers. You're far more likely to find a Russell Group university graduate in a fancy job than someone from a former poly in the North. The class system persisted despite everything, and attempts to broaden educational access ultimately did not simultaneously keep the quality uniformly high.
by kjellsbells