8.7

Reason

abstract

The technical goal of the course is to expose students to the practice of programming at a reasonably large scale. This version of the course teaches how the program design principles of the three major prerequisite courses scale to a large code base, in any programming language. Indeed, without relying on such fundamental design principles, a large code base may quickly become prohibitively complex and incomprehensible.

The social goal of the courses is to continue the development of collaboration and communication skills from the prerequisite programming courses. Going beyond pair programming, the course introduces panel-based code reviews. Students present their solutions to their peers on a panel (and the class). Both presenting code and understanding such presentations are critical skills for the modern software developer.