Who are you, Professor Malan?

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    This article will talk about the Harvard course “ Fundamentals of CS50 Programming ” from a slightly different angle: through the prism of the person who created this course in its modern form, the charismatic David Malan.

    Atypical course


    Audience Sanders Theater, Harvard Memorial Hall, Cambridge, Massachusetts. It hosts not only lectures, but concerts, performances, award ceremonies, and performances by famous people. These walls are used to the solemn noise of various kinds. But even for them, the CS50 course , a course on the basics of programming and computer science, with its spectacularly torn paper guides, DJs, dolls, excerpts from TV shows and other elements of popular culture, is atypical, as is generally the case with Harvard.

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    But what is there: it is not typical for any university in the world (we do not take theatrical specialties, there are other tasks). However, the CS50 is hosted by the Sanders Theater, as this is the largest audience at Harvard. In other rooms, everyone who wants to listen to Professor Malan’s lectures risks not fit. In recent years, the CS50 has been a confident leader in the number of students choosing it (we, of course, do not consider “virtual” listeners from the Internet).

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    This has not always been the case. At Harvard, the CS50 settled back in the eighties of the last century, but was completely different: high-quality (and how else else at Harvard!), But quite traditional in style, a programming course for beginners. Not too numerous, but inspired many to become IT pros.

    Dramatic changes came in 2007, when the CS50 was led by David Malan. With his arrival, the course became like an exciting show with an excellently written script, the constant involvement of spectators (students) and various characters, ranging from “muppets” dolls to “live” stars of the IT world, associated with Harvard - Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer ...



    It would seem to someone that the shows in these lectures are too many. But! It is important to note that the quality of the course, its academic character and fullness - were not affected. Rather, the opposite: the CS50 is constantly evolving, capturing innovation, and does not at all look like a frozen statue from the past, consisting of technologies that have sunk into oblivion, which our students are stuffed with almost everywhere. After all, this is one of the first university courses to be fully accessible on the Internet .

    It is known: people are more likely to absorb serious information if it is presented with burning eyes and allusions to well-known or catchy things. We are used to the fact that in scientific courses we are fed abstract tasteless crackers, not caring about our digestion. And the car spun. CS50 began to grow by leaps and bounds.



    Of course, the growth of the course cannot be attributed exclusively to David with his charisma and remarkable directorial abilities: the sphere itself and interest in it invariably grow regardless of his efforts. Perhaps, with nuclear physics, this number would not work. And David does not pull the whole blanket over himself: he is assisted by numerous assistants from among the young teachers and yesterday's students of the course. Nevertheless, for many, Professor Malan, who is able not only to tell just about the complex, but also to inspire, is one of the main reasons for enrolling in a course. So, the sixth lecture “CS50 Fundamentals of Programming”, the translations of which we are engaged in, was delivered not by Malan, but by his assistant Rob Bowden. Seeing a stranger, some viewers of the online version of the course got excited: is David really going to leave the CS50 and do something else? Maybe, appropriate scientific research or more "advanced" courses? In the end, a person may become bored from year to year teaching the same thing, and even more so - the basics.

    We hasten to assure: David Malan from CS50 is not going anywhere. And in the next section of the article we will try to explain why. More precisely, he himself will tell us everything.

    Atypical professor


    David Malan, a professor with the prefix "Gordon McKay" (this name is an additional honorary title from the Harvard professorship, established in honor of philanthropist and philanthropist Gordon Mackay), is probably Harvard's most famous acting teacher.

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    In the column "About me" on his Facebook page - a short phrase "I teach CS50" and no more personal characteristics. Only information about the place of work and study (no surprises: Harvard in both cases, David graduated from college in 1999), about previous projects (IT companies) and place of residence (Cambridge, Massachusetts). As well as links to websites, the names of which appear mainly in the same four letters familiar to us from self-description: CS50 .

    And all would be fine if you did not know that the CS50 is a course for absolute beginners. An intelligent student who knows basic mathematics and how to use the keyboard will “pull” him if he so desires.

    “To me, too, a pride for the Harvard professor!” Someone will think. It is customary for us to underestimate primary education in any sense, and the achievements of professors are measured by the complexity and novelty of their research. And here is the anatomy of computers for complete "noobs" and the basics of programming for them!

    If you leave Facebook and search on the Harvard website, we find that David writes about himself about the following:
    “My research interests include cybersecurity, digital forensics, botnets, computer science education, distance, joint and computer training. In graduate school, I worked with Dean Michael D. Smith as part of the "Group of Programming Languages" (a Harvard association of students and teachers studying the problems associated with the implementation and design of programming languages, ed.), Where I studied programming languages, compilers and security. They told me then that I got a mirror shield, and it will prevent most attacks, and Like Likes will not be able to eat it (the last phrase is an allusion to the The Legend of Zelda series of games, the monster Like Likes could eat some types of weapons and armor, but not a mirror probably David is hinting at achieving Zen in security - ed.).

    My research was part of a Securitas group project whose main focus is software-level security. In my dissertation, I suggested the rapid detection of botnets as part of collaborative peer networks (here is a link to David's work, in English cs.harvard.edu/malan/publications/thesis.pdf ). One of the practical consequences of this work was the Wormboy driver for detecting worms on the server side.

    Prior to joining Securitas, I worked with Professor Matt Welsh in the SYRAH Code Blue project on the use of wireless sensor networks for prehospital and emergency care, disaster response, and stroke rehabilitation. Associated with this work was the EccM module for TinyOS, which demonstrates the viability of elliptical cryptography on MICA2. ”

    As you can see, with such an education, interests and energy, this person could seriously engage in science or create an IT company. Or teach something advanced, if he really likes to share knowledge with future generations. But no, for some reason David leads the CS50 and a few more more or less "beginner" courses that do not require in-depth knowledge from the professor. To another scientist, the “reference” to the junior courses, especially the permanent one, may seem mortal longing, but not to Malan:

    “I listened to the CS50 at Harvard when I was in my second year in the fall semester of 1996, and it was my inspiration for moving to computer science. It was led by Brian Kernighan himself (“K” in K&R! Under this abbreviation lies the first book on the C language written by the authors of the language Brian Kernigan and Dennis Ritchie. - Ed.), Now he works at Princeton.

    In the summer of next year, I changed my main specialization from political science to computer. I still remember that Friday night when I plunged into the first Problem Set (weekly homework on programming). The feeling of uplift that I felt from his decision turned out to be significant! Since then, the course has taken a special place in my heart. And if I needed to choose one and only one course for teaching, I would not hesitate.

    I was very lucky: at the time when I defended my dissertation (Ph. D.), my supervisor Michael D. Smith, who taught CS50, received the position of dean and I had a happy opportunity to take up the course. Hit the right place at the right time! ”

    Do you hear? A Harvard professor speaks of the possibility of teaching a beginner’s course as a great success and an informed choice! And he is not at all bored of teaching “the same thing year after year”:

    “The CS50 is constantly changing, and in the most non-trivial way,” says David. - sometimes these changes concern simply the schedule, more often - applied technologies, and sometimes geographically! (here David hinted at the official status of CS50 at another Ivy League university, Yale, into which the course came in 2015 - approx.ed). These changes keep me in good shape, leaving me motivated and interested. More precisely, not even that: I myself constantly initiate these changes in order to remain motivated and interested!

    But besides me, everything changes constantly: every year new students listen to the course, new assistants grow up and all these people bring new ideas for the development of the course. The number and quality of practical exercises is increasing, as are the demonstrations of the code in lectures. The paradigms that we teach also change over time (this, of course, applies more to the part of the course on web programming, C changes affect to a much lesser extent). We also do not linger on the platforms we are accustomed to: in 2015, we connected the CS50 to a modern cloud-based IDE instead of the virtual machine that we had previously used. At some point, course lectures appeared on the Internet. In 2010, we held the Hackathon for the first time, in 2011 we introduced days of puzzles, and most recently, in the summer of 2016, the first open coding competition took placeCS50 Coding Contest , in which students were asked to solve the maximum number of tasks in C.

    Currently, we are shooting a course in 4K resolution (and we started with a modest SD 4: 3 picture), and in the fall of 2016 the opportunity to watch it with virtual reality glasses will be presented for the first time. So the monotony from year to year is not about the CS50! ”

    If you like David, you want, not want, but you become infected. And, perhaps, this is his most important and indisputable advantage as a lecturer. There are enough people who know the material well for beginners. But the true popularizers of science or art are always a few, but they are able to ignite those who without them could never have known, not understood, and not felt. Remember the tireless popularizers of science, such as Jacob Perelman in the USSR or Isaac Asimov in the USA. The first is known for the mass of popular science books, such as “Entertaining Physics” or “Entertaining Mathematics”, the second, in addition to science fiction books, also very actively wrote non-fiction books on topics from arithmetic and physics to geography and history.

    You can recall Leonard Bernstein. We know him first of all as a composer (and he wrote musicals and academic music) and a conductor, and in the west he is also known as a person who has given numerous public lectures on music in the 1950s and 1970s, trying to convey its beauty and structure music to everyone and everywhere. The television recordings of his "Young people concerts", aimed at children, Omnibus television programs for a wide range of listeners, as well as videos of more serious lectures that he gave at Harvard in 1973, have survived. In the United States, more than one generation of musicians claims that they began to understand music precisely thanks to Bernstein, a teacher, and many - “in absentia”, according to the records of his lectures.

    Something tells us that the fate of Malan the teacher (and partly already embodied) is waiting for him. And he is extremely pleased with her:

    “Previously, I could not imagine that I would be doing what I do today. I started teaching only to improve my public speaking skills. The first time I spoke to an audience in my third year of college. It was horribly bad. It seemed like I could never be good enough for public speaking. Nevertheless, I worked on improving them, and it seems that I have achieved something. I plan to continue to use them: I will teach CS50 as long as I am allowed to do so. Why? Because this is what I truly love. "

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