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scottlamblast Monday at 6:24 PM1 replyview on HN

> Good schools have limited bandwidth or interest in remedial education/hand-holding and academics don't have a lot of interest in putting together materials that will be outdated next year.

I think they rarely escape doing this hand-holding unless they're actually willing to flunk out students en masse. Maybe MIT is; the University of Iowa certainly wasn't. So they end up just in a state of denial in which they say they're teaching all this great theoretical material but they're doing a half-assed job of teaching either body of knowledge.

I also don't think this knowledge gets outdated that quickly. I'd say if they'd put together a topic list like this for 2006, more than half the specific tools would still be useful, and the concepts from the rest would still transfer over pretty well to what people use today. For example, yeah, we didn't have VS Code and LSP back then, but IDEs didn't look that different. We didn't (quite) have tmux but used screen for the same purpose. etc. Some things are arguably new (devcontainers have evolved well beyond setting up a chroot jail, AI tools are new) but it's mostly additive. If you stay away from the most bleeding-edge stuff (I'm not sure the "AI for the shell (Warp, Zummoner)" is wise to spend much time on) you never have to throw much out.


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ghafflast Monday at 6:37 PM

The whole container universe is pretty different even if the process/threads/etc. foundations aren't that changed. Certainly <umm> a book I wrote about the state of computing in the early 2010s--largely derived from things I had written over a few prior years--was hopelessly out of date within just a few years.

There certainly are fits and starts in the industry. I'm not sure the past 5 years or so looks THAT different from today. (Leaving aside LLMs.)

From my peripheral knowledge, MIT does try to hand-hold to some degree. Isn't the look-left and look-right, one of those people won't be here next year sort of places. But, certainly, people do get in over their head at some places. I tutored/TAd in (business) grad school and some people just didn't have the basics. I couldn't do remedial high school arithmetic from the ground up--especially for some people who weren't even willing to try seriously.

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