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From: jvz@sdcsvax.UUCP (John Van Zandt)
Newsgroups: net.cse
Subject: learning unix or not learning unix
Message-ID: <392@sdcsvax.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 17-Oct-84 23:11:27 EDT
Article-I.D.: sdcsvax.392
Posted: Wed Oct 17 23:11:27 1984
Date-Received: Sun, 21-Oct-84 10:30:58 EDT
Organization: EECS Dept. U.C. San Diego
Lines: 27

Any college education is supposed to teach the fundamentals, not
specific examples.  A student leaving such an institution should
be capable of learning and adapting to new environments and new
ideas.  Whether a student learns the details of any specific operating
system or programming language is irrelevant.  A student with a
good education should be able to learn 'C' or UNIX very quickly;
the principles are common across languages and O/S's.

And the suggestion which was made that UNIX/C should be included because
of popularity has problems, because popularity says nothing about
the underlying principles which might be better taught in other ways.
Remember, students going to a 4-year college/university have very
few classes in their major field.  Wasting one of the classes to
learn the popular items might cause the student to miss something
more fundamental which would be of help in the future.  

Remember, the difference between a trade school and a university
is in what is taught and the expected product.  Trade schools are
great at teaching how to use a specific language/operating system.


John Van Zandt
University of California, San Diego

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