Re: [COFF] 21st Century Equivalent to 'learn'?

On Wed, Mar 04, 2020 at 01:49:25PM +1000, Warren Toomey wrote: I am not sure what kind are your students, but back when I was one (and not in US, so my approach might not apply) there was some kind of minimum required from a student to pass as "knows Unix". Stuff like "show directory contents", "make directory", move around via cd and pwd, chmod, some editing, write a C program and compile (CS students were meant to program). It is possible that knowledge of /usr/bin/make was optional. /bin/tar was definitely optional. Majority (i.e. "all") would not give a hoot about some "yoo-neecs". DOS and Windows 3.1 ruled in businesses, where the majority expected to find themselves after graduation. Windows 3x was all the rage. It had multitasking! And Novell networks, for the more ambitious. I learned more than minimum, because I actually wanted to _use_ the facilities. Which means, solving a problem by writing some code (shell script, makefile, C-file, awk). No need to convince me or make it easy by some "pupil shell". I never expected this, I only expected good manual or Readme. BTW, I also perceived tools available on Unix as superior to anything I could lay my hands on, including AmigaOS (which had number of similar tools, but poor multitasking sometimes resulted in frozen computer). Maybe VMS could compete, but was not so easy to have account on it. So I falsely assumed one should choose the best tools and now I am on this God-forgotten mailing list. The list composed by Andy Kosela seems very plausible to my eyes, but I am afraid the majority of modern students likewise are not going to give a hoot. Perhaps you could make some of them care more if you gave them a kind of contest. Bare bones system install in virtual machine, no X, no compiler, no perl, but yes vim and yes emacs (and maybe some others, joe/jed?). Solve a problem? Small database a'la rolodex? For the rest, just demonstrate they can mkdir/ls/cd/chmod etc and let them go. Solving Project Euler tasks with shell scripts (or awk, when applicable). A bit harder - solve the tasks and make an uber-script which lists available solutions (say, it will find there are solutions for problem 3, 5 and 9 and list them) and can display an answer for problem by running a script. Student writes a solution-script and uber-script auto detects new file and can use it without need to be edited. If the solutions dir is empty, it will say no solutions found. Etc. I suppose some folks will be delighted by doing such things. Other will be kicking and screaming - no need to give them bad memories of Unix. Rather, let them see others who achieve. I am not sure, maybe I would be a very bad teacher. -- Regards, Tomasz Rola -- ** A C programmer asked whether computer had Buddha's nature. ** ** As the answer, master did "rm -rif" on the programmer's home ** ** directory. And then the C programmer became enlightened... ** ** ** ** Tomasz Rola mailto:tomasz_rola@bigfoot.com **