Compiling and running code, version control

We’re getting comfortable with using the command line, managing folders and files, and writing structured text, but all you’ve been doing in your CS courses (if you’re taking CS courses!) up to this point has been programming, and the things we’ve been doing in this course haven’t exactly been related to programming.

We’re going to switch things up a bit: we’re not going to do any programming, but we are going to look at how to compile and run code on Linux systems (we’ll do Java, Python, and C). Even if you don’t know how to program, knowing how to compile and run code can help with work or research you might be doing that has nothing to do with Computer Science.

… and while it’s cool 😎 to be able to compile and run code on remote systems and you’re definitely going to have to do this lots in the future, it’s, uh, not exactly a significant amount of course material.

Our bigger topic is going to be an introduction to version control. Version control can help you in a couple of different ways, whether you’re taking CS courses or not:

• Sometimes when working on code, I (me, Franklin) will find myself in a situation where some of my code doesn’t work, but it sorta works. So: I copy and paste the chunk of code, comment one of the chunks and edit the other because I was worried about losing my working code. Even worse, I’ve had working code that I edited and then it didn’t work anymore and I couldn’t remember what I changed.

• Sometimes when I am writing (and I am usually writing in Markdown and \LaTeX!), I re-read what I wrote and realize that I should probably make some changes (e.g., I’ve changed this paragraph at least 3 times). Sometimes I will cut and paste paragraphs from one place to another only to realize that the way that I had it originally flows a lot more nicely than … whatever this is right now, but the undo feature in my text editor doesn’t go back far enough to get back to the better flowing state and I just can’t reproduce it.

  (“You can track changes in Word!” I can hear you saying through my screen, and, yes, I definitely can track changes in Word, but then I would have to use Word.)

• Sometimes I am working on an experiment (or something that requires me to keep track of values that I’m observing), and I accidentally and unintentionally change a value, but I don’t notice until it’s too late (or I never notice ☹️).

We’re going to use version control software to help us keep track of changes that we’ve made to plain text files over time (plain text includes both documents we’re writing in Markdown and \LaTeX and source code). While many different version control software exist, we’re going to be specifically looking at git, and we’re going to be using some web-based software called GitLab to help us.