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From: chris@umcp-cs.UUCP (Chris Torek)
Newsgroups: net.cse
Subject: Re: Teaching UNIX
Message-ID: <992@umcp-cs.UUCP>
Date: Sun, 11-Nov-84 14:16:51 EST
Article-I.D.: umcp-cs.992
Posted: Sun Nov 11 14:16:51 1984
Date-Received: Tue, 13-Nov-84 01:16:41 EST
References: <88@athena.UUCP> <640@clyde.UUCP>
Organization: U of Maryland, Computer Science Dept., College Park, MD
Lines: 43

There are really two issues here.  First of all (as someone else has
already pointed out) it is far cheaper to support hordes of students on
one Univac 1100 running EXEC-8 than it is to support said hordes on
VAXen or equivalents running Unix or some other "modern" operating
system (VMS is considerably better than EXEC-8, for example).  Many
universities just can't afford the CPU crunchons it takes to teach Unix
to undergraduates.

The second is that if someone really knows what s/he (it?) is doing,
knowing Unix well (from the outside; I'm not talking heavy kernel here)
is not particularly important.  With the right concepts, everything
else just falls into place.  To take a reverse example, I recently had
to write a short SNOBOL program on our 1182, running EXEC-8.  Even
working on an unfamiliar machine (I avoid the Univac as much as
possible) and in an unfamiliar language (I've never so much as *looked*
at SNOBOL before), it didn't take me long to write it -- because I
understood, in general, what was going on.  Sure, I needed lots of
reference manuals nearby, but if I were to use the machine or the
language more often, I could soon hack at a reasonable rate.  (I'm
ashamed to admit that it took probably 3 hours to do such a tiny
program:  I spent at least an hour and a half before discovering that
you can't use NE(foo) on user-defined types; gotta use \IDENT(foo).
Sigh.)

If someone understands the basic concepts in operating systems, then
knowing Unix isn't so important.  Pipes should be nothing more than
a pleasant surprise (``gee, you mean I don't have to store 30 megabyte
temporary files?''), the tool philosophy should be familiar, learning
the editor shouldn't be too difficult (hey, if I can learn to use EDT
in an hour, anyone should be able to learn Emacs in 20 minutes! :-)),
and so forth.  [Note, however, that being able to *use* something and
being a wizard at it are two entirely different things.]

If you need a Unix wizard, *then* Unix experience is a must.  But if
all you need is someone to write programs, then find someone who knows
language design concepts and can write algorithms!  Experience is not
the most important thing in this case.
-- 
(This line accidently left nonblank.)

In-Real-Life: Chris Torek, Univ of MD Comp Sci Dept (301) 454-7690
UUCP:	{seismo,allegra,brl-bmd}!umcp-cs!chris
CSNet:	chris@umcp-cs		ARPA:	chris@maryland