Xref: utzoo comp.sources.wanted:4558 comp.unix.questions:8240 Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!pacbell!pbhya!whh From: whh@pbhya.PacBell.COM (Wilson Heydt) Newsgroups: comp.sources.wanted,comp.unix.questions Subject: Re: Unix editors Message-ID: <16545@pbhya.PacBell.COM> Date: 15 Jul 88 20:53:32 GMT References: <272@jackson.UUCP> <574@splut.UUCP> <16534@pbhya.PacBell.COM> <814@lakesys.UUCP> Organization: Pacific * Bell, Oakland, CA Lines: 42 In article <814@lakesys.UUCP>, mark@lakesys.UUCP (Mark Storin) writes: > Editors are tools. Some tools are better for some things than others. > You wouldn't expect much fun from trying a standard screwdriver on a philips > head screw. In the spirit of the original question, students should learn as > many editors as they are capable of learning. School is where you should be > learning these things. You develop your capability to learn new instruction > sets. Adds flexibility to your thinking. Improves concentration, etc. > > Preferences? Everybody has preferences. You bet. Possibly we also need a better grade of student. I'm been slowly coming to the conclusion that there is so much that REALLY NEEDS to be understood to have complete education (see the the debate about requirements out of Stanford a few months ago) that College undergraduate curricula should be considered to be 5 years rather than 4. You want flexibility? When I was a student, the beginning CS course taught Algol in 9 weeks. The corresponding EECS course did FORTRAN and Algol in the same time. I suspect the real reason for hiring marginal programmers is because the demand for anyone who can code exceeds the supply of those whose talents run in that direction. Companies are reaching farther and farther down the talent pool and coming up with some piss-poor examples. All this is complicated by the "title inflation" that took place during Nixon's wage-price freeze. At that time, people got title promotions for doing the same work in order to be paid more. coders became programmers and programmers became programmer-analysts or systems analysts. Now, "coder" is never used. Pity, one sees so many analysts (who used to be 'programmers') that can't write competent code or debug without elaborate help. [Help! Stop me before I tell more 'good old days' stories!] --Hal ========================================================================= Hal Heydt | "Hafnium plus Holmium is Analyst, Pacific*Bell | one-point-five, I think." 415-645-7708 | --Dr. Jane Robinson {att,bellcore,sun,ames,pyramid}!pacbell!pbhya!whh