From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Message-ID: To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu Subject: Re: [9fans] Re: configure misery From: mirtchov@cpsc.ucalgary.ca In-Reply-To: <2147483647.1069000663@[192.168.42.6]> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Date: Sun, 16 Nov 2003 17:04:49 -0700 Topicbox-Message-UUID: 8ce2cd02-eacc-11e9-9e20-41e7f4b1d025 > 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