David Malan

So I think the better formulation isn't that

You don't need to know these things, but rather you won't need to use these things, use in a literal sense.

Like I don't see as a very popular language, even according to some rankings each year, it's, you know, the number one, number two language in terms of its omnipresence still to this day, because it's very highly performant, albeit more challenging to write than some languages.

I only use C for five weeks during CS50 itself, but that doesn't mean that it hasn't helped me understand higher level languages, what is going on inside of a system, how you can improve the performance of or the design of some system by understanding, again, those first principles.

I don't use Scratch except for one week out of the year.

I do use Python more frequently and I use JavaScript and some HTML and CSS.

But I think if you're going to call yourself an engineer, you should absolutely have mastery of and knowledge of those underlying building blocks if you want to

Not just output something that, frankly, AI could output nowadays, but you can understand and you can create the next thing or the solution to some other problem that we haven't even yet solved.

I think that's the better mindset to appreciate, yes, I'm not going to need to use Scratch or C or maybe some of the other things we touch on in CS50.

But the knowledge and the principles that we extract from those implementation details are incredibly valuable.

If you want to be an engineer and not just say a coder, which is a distinction that some folks might make.

It is.

It's only for an hour.

And technically, temporarily, it's offered in the middle of the semester for the on campus students.

It coincides by design with family weekend when first years and juniors

students, parents come to town very frequently.

And so we do it as a very broad introduction to what everyone is talking about nowadays in the AI space.

There are full-fledged classes, of course, at Harvard and other institutions that students can take.

And it's really meant to whet their appetite, but also give them some context for the very tools we're using in CS50.

We have this virtual rubber duck that's built on top of OpenAI's APIs and Microsoft Azure's API service.