Ryan Peterman

He's a Harvard professor famous for transforming CS50 into a world-class online computer science course.

How do you keep people engaged for a three-hour lecture?

I'm curious what you would say to someone that has that mindset that you don't need to actually know how the computer works.

We also discussed how AI is impacting cheating and enrollment.

Maybe programming will be useless in the future.

Here's the full episode.

You posted this photo of your first assignment in CS50, not as the teacher, but as the student actually, under Brian Kernaghan.

What was your experience like getting into computer science?

And I saw on that assignment, it says minus two.

And there's a little note there that I actually couldn't quite make out.

Looking back now as the teacher, why did you get a minus two there?

I actually, I transcribed it and I tried to compile your program and it didn't compile.

Interesting.

Okay.

Actually, I was able to compile.

It's kind of interesting.

But you have to like kind of force the compiler to do your bidding.

It's like void main.

And you're supposed to be like int main typically.

What was the story behind you going from a student to the teacher eventually?