How do you acquire the fundamental computer skills to hack on a complex systems project like OCaml? What’s missing and how do you go about bridging the gap?
KC gives several resources for students to get up to speed with contributing to OCaml.
One of the interesting resources is MIT’s the Missing Semester. This semester I created our own version of this course, covering git, docker, VMs, terminal/bash, testing, static analysis and LLMs for code.
While we cover how to do a Pull Request, I don’t believe students are ready to actually contribute. Reading large codebases is a skill that even our graduate MSc students don’t have. Courses are designed to be contained, with projects that need to be graded with few human effort, resulting in standard assignments for all the students.
I would love to run something like the Fix a real-world bug course Nuno Lopes runs. But being able to review so many PRs is a bottleneck in a regular course.