[vincent-manis]

I once proposed a similar course at a major CS department where I was a junior faculty member. The response was “This is a university, we don't do things like this.” Result: students who couldn't use a debugger, did not know how to use source control systems, did not know how or why to write a shell script. Mostly, students didn't know how to use online help and documentation, leading to superstitious behaviour when doing lab work: “My friend told me to do this, I don't know why it works.” Yes, some of this can come in other course, but it's the first part to be dropped if time runs out. Even though a course like this should count for few if any credits, it is essential: helping students get more out of their other courses should be what is done at a university.

[commandersaki]

I agree this shouldn't be part of the curriculum and instead be extracurricular, which my understanding this course is at MIT.

This would be more appropriate to fit in a curriculum of a vocational IT course or bootcamp.

[Meekro]

This feels like biblical Pharisees putting ritual cleanliness above practical concerns. The professors see themselves as pursuing higher intellectual goals, but the reality is most of their students want programming jobs, and need to be taught skills that will be essential to those jobs (like using git).

[aleph_minus_one]

The purpose of universities is to prepare the student for academic research. If you really want a tertiary education that is more focused on practical considerations, at least in Germany there exist Fachhochschulen.

When you attend a university, but you at least want to have the option to get a programming job if you realize that academic research is not for you (which is in my opinion a very good idea considering the job prospect uncertainty in academia), you will of course additionally invest an insane amount of your free time (outside of your academic studies) to learn the necessary skills for this. If you don't do this, don't complain.

[Discordian93]

These skills are also useful for reproducible computational research