davidjmalan

Officially, we love them all equally. :)

Vim for me. 'Tis what we were taught when I took CS50 myself in 1996!

You might want to take a peek at two of CS50's seminars!

• Vim: Speed and Power at your Fingertips
• Vim

At the moment, submissions from students who are taking the course through Harvard College or Harvard Extension School are evaluated along axes of

• scope,
• correctness,
• design, and
• style

whereas submissions from students taking CS50 through edX or Harvard Division of Continuing Education are evaluated along the axes of

• scope and
• correctness.

Evaluating design at scale, I'm afraid, is non-trivial, since it's perhaps the most subjective and (for CS50 at least) quite time-consuming. More than just a score, it involves providing non-trivial qualitative feedback in the form of written, typed, or verbal comments. That's feasible (if still a challenge) for ~800 students at Harvard College and ~200 students at Harvard Extension School but not yet feasible, I'm afraid, for the thousands of submissions we receive via edX.

In the coming months, we hope to improve style50 such that it's used by all demographics for the assessment of style, after which we'll move on to the challenge of design! Odds are we'll facilitate peer feedback, too, but not leverage it for official assessment.

We used to use gcc, but we now use clang because of its clearer (if still sometimes arcane!) error messages.