Re: [9fans] Re: configure misery

[mirtchov@cpsc.ucalgary.ca]

> This isn't specific to just BSD and GNU. It's a general problem
> attributable to the large number of new programmers who haven't been
> mentored by people who understand the elegance of uncomplicated code
> and tools. This feeds upon itself, and once it reaches critical mass....

I think the teachers themselves are of the new generation.  This
doesn't help much, especially when the educational system (I have
personal experiences with two canadian universities) is forcing the
students to cover a lot of ground very quickly, with emphasis on
quantity of the material submitted.

Even if a teacher comes along who is willing to mentor students in
"the right way", they simply refuse to learn (except the usual 5% who
are willing, but they usually know how to do code right already) --
their goal is to get through the course without a drop of sweat,
usually because there are 5 other software engineering courses waiting
for them to draw diagrams of the waterfall.  The complaints that the
particular course below was "too difficult" drowned any benefit the
students had from taking it.

This is an undergraduate course I TA'd for last year (abstract
yourselves from the fact that they used OpenBSD, it could've been any
other lunix OS):

	http://ezine.daemonnews.org/200306/obsd-classroom.html

And a quote from the article:

	The other part of the problem was the students' fledgling
	code-reading skills.  The TAs taught students how to use the
	OpenBSD machines, build kernels, and use tools like grep to
	search for things in the kernel source, but I asked them to
	give students limited guidance in the code itself.  I had high
	expectations of the students' ability to read code, perhaps
	too high -- students are not exposed to a lot of C code now,
	and the OpenBSD kernel documentation, written by experts for
	experts, was of little help to students.

I would've loved to see this course taught in Plan 9, if nothing else
for the simplicity of the code the students needed to get through.  I
doubt though it would've made much difference in the end.  Perhaps
Nemo can share his experience with teaching Plan 9 to undergrads...

Are we offtopic enough already? :)

Andrey