A CS course might cover the architecture of git, or the technical underpinnings but probably shouldn't teach you how to do the basics. In my program this sort of skill was expected to be learned on your own, or maybe a single optional tutorial session with the TA
My uni has an on-prem installation of Github and this is where you upload and collaborate on your solutions. This isn't course specific, this is just what you do.
It’s odd to me that you’d expect them to. The CS program I was in used github for collaboration on a couple projects, but nothing really covering git tooling. All my classmates were either already familiar with it, or more than capable of figuring it out with a search or two. I’m guessing your program covered material that required a little more effort than a google search to build basic competency in?
How do you expect people to collaborate if they can't git? Git is not that easy to grok, not even for Ph.d. students who successfuly completed some very complex scientific research (I am trying to teach Git a few of them so it's very visible to me).
Making it the only way to send in homework motivates people to learn the absolute basics (I haven't seen anyone learn branching like this), but also pisses them off and a lot of times they don't want to use Git at all after that experience.
If a student is technically inclined, presumably anyone in a CS program, then the bare minimum of git should be accessible. At least what is necessary for basic collaboration. Re-basing & cherry-picking, bisecting, etc. and the implementation details of git along with other more advanced bits aren’t remotely necessary for this kind of collab.
A decent grasp of cloning, committing, and pushing seemed to be enough. Conflicts are inevitable, and will present a challenge to someone new to the system, but they’re not insurmountable. Good IDE integrated tooling probably goes a long way on this point.
Git will be a speed bump for a student that hasn’t already encountered an scm before. I didn’t take a poll, but I don’t recall any of my classmates encountering issues that they couldn’t work out.
> All my classmates were either already familiar with it, or more than capable of figuring it out with a search or two. I’m guessing your program covered material that required a little more effort than a google search to build basic competency in?
I did come across this charitable expectation in my CS coursework where you were given tools and expected already to know or to learn on your own. Which is fine if you want to weed people out. I can understand where someone might be frustrated if you hand them a tool and expect them to know or figure it out while they're learning new material.
Problem is, schools expect students to do this with like 100 tools and give no guidance on what to do, and why. It's absolutely overwhelming.
Even as a professional SW engineer for 10+ years, when I join a new job, the amount of new tools and workflows is overwhelming - and that's when I at least understand the descriptions. Dumping all that on a student is just idiotic, not good teaching.
I get what you’re saying. I didn’t feel overwhelmed by git, but I’d been working with it for a couple of years, so there’s a clear bias. I did run into frustration with other tools, though.
Maybe git, in particular, does deserve some specific focus given its unique status and ubiquity in the industry.
Thank you for the acknowledgement. I appreciate your consideration of an alternative view. Not everyone gits it at first and it takes some effort to learn.
CS programs that don't cover version control (as a concept) are a real head-scratcher to me.
Git didn't exist yet when I was in college, but day 1 was still going over version control as a concept and it was made clear you'd get a zero on any assignments if you didn't use it.
