Subject: RE: [hackers-il] Re: The Professor of Shoe-making Walks Bare-Foot ed

From: Chen Shapira <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 9 May 2002 16:33:33 +0300

> As long as Windows remains a commercial product for which there is no
> other implementaton, I don't think it should be emphasized in 
> a University.
> A university isn't vocational school. It's not about making people
> proficient in specific commercial tools or products.

I agree. University isn't a vocational school.
That's why I think that teaching how to program on a specific platform
doesn't belong to the university curriculum.
The fact that no one charges money for CVS doesn't mean that there should be
a course teaching how to use it.
The money (or commerciality) of the tool isn't the problem, its the fact
that learning how to use a specific tool isn't what universities aim at.
Relational DB courses managed to avoid this problem nicely by teaching
principles and letting the students practice on whatever DB they want.

If you want a "best practices" course - that's cool. But teach the ideas
(source control is important, scripting, etc) and let the students choose
the platform (CVS+Perl, Source-Safe+VB, and everything else)

I'm not supporting windows here - I'm just saying that there's no point in
teaching specific tools and platforms.

Thanks,
Chen.

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From: "Nadav Har'El" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 9 May 2002 17:05:27 +0300

> that learning how to use a specific tool isn't what universities aim at.

Note that I didn't suggest learning Linux because it's free, but rather
because Unix is not a specific product - it is a complete way of thought
and set of standards implemented by countless companies (Unix, AIX, Tru64,
HPUX, Solaris, BSDI, Apple, and even Microsoft(!) Xenix) and organizations.
It's interfaces have been standardized, and are relatively stable (when
compared to the Windows programs, UI and APIs).

And another thing - teaching about RCS (or CVS, or whatever) for 20 minutes,
after teaching general source-code control ideas, is not the same as having
a whole semester course about MS-Windows, MS-Office, or even MS Visual C++.
The first can be done in a University (many times, by the metargelim), the
second has absolutely no place in a University (though unfortunately it
*does* exist :( I know HaifaU has a whole course about using MS-Windows,
MS-Word and MS-Excell, a fact which I find appalling).

> principles and letting the students practice on whatever DB they want.

Hmm, maybe it's because a single standard (SQL) exists and every DB can
talk this standard?

Unfortunately(?), a single standard in the OS arena (or the word-processor,
or compiler arenas) does not exist, so it cannot be used as a platform to
teach on. The closest thing to a single standard is Unix. Granted, Unix
is not as common as MS-Windows in the home-market, but it is a standard
used by dozens of companies' operating systems, and it is ubiquitously
availble.

Moreover, the availability of source code allows the students to learn
better, if they can see how their operating system / database program /
whatever actually works. Originally, this is why BSD because so prevelent
in the university world (I talked about this in my "short history of BSD"
post a few months ago) - because source licenses were cheaply available
to universities worldwide, and students and faculty found it very educating
to be able to see the code implementing the OS principles which they had
just learned. And more than that: it allowed them to *modify* the source
code to study new ideas they were researching.

-- 
Nadav Har'El                        |      Thursday, May 9 2002, 27 Iyyar 5762
[email-masked]             |-----------------------------------------
Phone: +972-53-245868, ICQ 13349191 |"God is dead." - Nietzsche; "Nietzsche is
http://nadav.harel.org.il           |dead" - God

---

From: Oleg Goldshmidt <[email-masked]>
Date: 10 May 2002 18:12:25 +0300

"Nadav Har'El" <[email-masked]> writes:

> I know HaifaU has a whole course about using MS-Windows,

Whenever I need to edit a couple of lines in a Word document someone
sends me I wish i had taken a year-long course. I cannot figure the
bloody thing out, and I don't consider myself all that stupid. It must
be lack of education. 

As for Excel, I could never make it work... :-(

-- 
Oleg Goldshmidt | [email-masked] 
If it aint't broken it hasn't got enough features yet.