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friendlysock
1 year ago
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link
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It’s Worth It: Leaving a Full-time Software Development Job at 18 to Learn Computer Science
tl,dr:
I skipped college and instead did a CS bootcamp. Also I am too young to buy a beer but you should listen to my life experiences because software.
Also, I wonder if this is stealth advertising for the bootcamp they attended?
Slightly less harshly, congrats on being honest that the autodidact thing didn’t quite work out for you and I hope you found something that does.
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This is the least charitable tl;dr I’ve read on lobsters.
He did an excellent job articulating his motivation for taking school. He wrote appropriate approachable examples about the knowledge he gained. The narrative is rich enough to be interesting but concise enough to not get in the way of the real content. And he doesn’t presume to know more than what he does.
I wish more of the posts here were this well written.
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Hi! I’m one of Tiger’s teachers. We’re very proud of Tiger: very few people have his level of maturity, modesty and capability all at once at his age. We didn’t ask him to write this story, but we do hope he gets some recognition through it.
We’re also not a bootcamp: we teach the same undergrad and introductory grad level computer science as a typical college or university, we just don’t grant degrees. Most of our students spread their courses out over a longer period of time: Tiger’s ability to take them all expeditiously like this is testament to his ambition and studiousness.
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Ah, that makes a bit more sense. Between your website and Tiger’s writeup I got the impression it was meant to be taken all at the same time instead of staggered out.
It looks a bit like other professional training courses based on the pricetag ( 1.8k/course, 9 courses )–I was just a bit annoyed from my (evidently mistaken) impression this was being marketed as an alternative to proper CS education (the precise value and content of which is quite up for debate).
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I believe you were the guy asking here about foundational materials for CS a while back. Did any of the recommendations from Lobsters make it into your classes or the one Tiger took?
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Good to hear! :)
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It’s hard to tell, which is the point. People often love things and write about/talk about them. This used to be called “word of mouth advertising” and was the best kind of advertising. It was also short range, because it was limited to immediate social circles and companies had a hard time gaming it - you had to buy off too many people. Now with social media and blogs, suddenly such social engineering does scale, if you do it right. I like your contrarian viewpoint @angersock. And I’m troubled by the down votes you have received.
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It would be very nice if there were some sort of test you can take to find out where your knowledge is seriously lacking.
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That’s really cool!
You should add a section on graphics, the standard text being Foley and van Dam’s Computer Graphics: Principles and Practice. Goldman’s book is really nice if you like a more geometric/mathematical approach, though probably not as practially useful.
EDIT:
For compression, I’d suggest Sayood’s Introduction to Data Compression
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You really should add it as a first-class topic, because it is. Think about how much of your computer is being devoted to drawing text, rendering pictures, and interfacing with users.
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I agree with angersock on this. Ill add that the GUI pretty much created the PC revolution. Then browsers. Then gaming engines drove quite a bit of Intel and AMD decisions about their CPU’s. Also, graphics and CAD were main drivers of Mac and UNIX workstation sales respectively.
So, it’s one of the most high-impact things in CompSci. There’s also tons of opportunities for research there from fundamentals all the way to improving existing products/methods. That includes research funded by the companies themselves with university partners.
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Michael Abrash’s Graphics Programming Black Book is also very good.
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This reads like an ad for your company.
I really have to disagree on the Dragon Book. It is the “canonical text” in the sense that it is the only book that people who don’t have a background in PL/compilers have heard of (not saying that this is you, necessarily). I think Modern Compiler Implementation in ML is a much better book. For deeper dives, see Types & Programming Languages, the GC Handbook, Parsing Techniques: A Practical Guide, and Optimizing Compilers for Modern Architectures.
Eve isn’t on the frontier of PL, if you want to follow PL research then read {PLDI, POPL, ICFP, OOPSLA}.
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Thanks for the feedback!
- A 2000 word ad? Sorry you didn’t get any value out of it, perhaps you’re not the target audience.
- We have used the Appel book too but have had more success with the Dragon book. I think a lot of people have, which is why it has remained such a popular suggestion for undergrads, but like I mentioned in the article it has some thoughtful detractors and you appear to be one of them
- The frontier of PL is not the frontier to which I was referring
Thanks again :)
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A 2000 word ad? Sorry you didn’t get any value out of it, perhaps you’re not the target audience.
I’m definitely not the target audience, but I care a lot about getting people interested in PL and compilers. Sorry, I think I was a bit flippant.
We have used the Appel book too but have had more success with the Dragon book.
I imagine that the dynamics are different in a classroom vs self-study. The latest edition of the Dragon Book is 1000 pages and spends a significant amount of time on things that aren’t appropriate for a newcomer to compilers. There are over 200 pages dedicated to parsing, for example. In a classroom setting you can pick and choose for your syllabus, but someone doing self-study won’t have the background necessary to know what is important and what isn’t. This is why I prefer recommending less overwhelming texts and supplementing them with advanced, subject-specific texts. In my experience the advanced texts are better references later in your career, too.
The other problem I have with the Dragon Book is that it spends almost no time on type checking, which is a major part of many compiler front-ends. Appel’s book spends time on it + the supplemental TAPL/ATTAPL provides a much more thorough introduction. Do you cover this in your course?
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Yes I totally agree. So do the authors; they strongly recommend aiming to cover the content over two quarters or even semesters, so it’s certainly a book that benefits from guided study. I should revise the article to make this clear, thank you.
There is some content on type checking in the book, and yes we do visit it in the course. I can see why the coverage in the book would be unsatisfying for somebody whose particular interest is in types, but our students seem to find it sufficient. That may be because the languages they use day to day tend not to have rich type systems.
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I’ll add that a meta-analysis of recommendations on HN and Amazon reviews had me going with Modern Compiler Implementation in C by Appel followed by Practical Compiler Construction by Holm for optimizations etc. I’m still up for feedback on best books for getting people started on foundations esp for mainstream compilers.
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I too would recommend the Modern Compiler Implementation in _ series by Appel, but would strongly recommend the ML edition over the C edition. I’ve had both, and the C version feels like a lossy translation from the original ML – ML has many relevant abstractions for language implementation that C lacks, so the ML edition can spend more time covering the material. (And for what it’s worth, I’m more familiar with OCaml than SML, but had no problem following it.)
I also frequently recommend Compiler Construction by Niklaus Wirth, before the Appel books. While Appel’s book has more depth, Wirth’s is focused on hitting the ground running, learning a couple simple techniques and getting something working end-to-end. In about a hundred pages, it builds up a lexer, recursive-descent parser, bytecode compiler, and virtual machine for Oberon, a dialect of Pascal. Some people might find seeing how everything fits together more helpful than spending what feels like hundreds of pages on parsing without a usable system in sight. There’s a free PDF online.
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I used to recommend the Wirth book as I started with it doing my BASIC variants. The reason I stopped is that he seems to do the opposite of what about any mainstream compiler would do. From his requirements to the implementation. You get a start on a foundation you have to throw away in favor of another foundation. This led me to find the simplest book to start with that explained passes & techniques that step someone toward understanding existing compilers.
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I’m not familiar with the Parr book but I skimmed it just now. This ultimately appears to be a tutorial on ANTLR and the visitor pattern in Java. You make an interpreter but ultimately this is a trivial application of the visitor pattern. This is nearly 400 pages long, but where’s the beef? There’s no content about language semantics, SSA form, flow analyses, garbage collection, etc. I’m not sure what relation this book has to MCI or the Dragon Book, and couldn’t see recommending it to someone who wanted to learn about languages.
(I dislike some things about Java, but the Dragon book also uses Java in new editions, and honestly Java has advantages over C and C++ for prototyping languages.)
I can’t imagine teaching compiler fundamentals in a language without sum types. You may not end up using a language like ML/Haskell/Rust in the real world, but at least while learning you won’t be in Visitor Pattern Hell™.
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The first language book should just be writing a lexer, parser, AST, and tree walking interpreter… the Parr book is totally fine for that. And it has a lot of other stuff you didn’t mention, like static typing, which he builds up nicely in a few steps.
SSA, flow analysis, GC, are all their own topics beyond that. People need to write a few thousand lines of basic code before moving onto those topics.
I might choose SICP over that book to learn about languages because it gets to the essence a little faster (and that’s what I did 20 years ago in school). Although honestly skipping lexing and parsing is bad IMO.
I like OCaml, but for a lot of programmers, especially working ones, learning ML at the same time as learning programming languages is probably more extra work. Although I agree you should do it eventually.
Yeah the visitor pattern seems overblown, but Parr mentions the “external visitor pattern” in one of his books (I’m pretty sure it is that one.) All it is duplicating type information with an enum and using a switch statement, pretty much like you would in ML. I noticed that the TypeScript compiler has a heterogeneous AST and uses tons of duplicate switch statements. So it’s more ML style than Java style, even though TypeScript is pretty similar to Java or C#.
I honestly have never used the visitor pattern successfully… I don’t get the problem with a switch statement over data, and other “experts” do that too. It’s supposedly more functional than OOP, but it works just fine in OO languages.
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Lobsters is not your advertising channel. Please stop.
Sorry! Wasn’t sure where the line was since everything else I’ve posted was well received.