Teaching Linux
My school required CS majors to take an “Intro to UNIX” class, and used Linux to do so every year I was there (it was probably Solaris a few years prior). It wasn’t and isn’t a hard thing for CS majors (or similar) to learn, and it’s something they’ll almost certainly come across in their careers at some point or another. But the idea that a CS major has to learn Linux, as many of the comments on Slashdot suggest, is a bit ridiculous, I think.
There are a lot of advantages to using Linux. Tools like grep, awk, sed are incredibly powerful and useful nearly every day, to say nothing of the powers of Bash, Perl, Python, et cetera. But none of those have anything to do with Linux, other than they’re all installed by default in most (probably all) Linux distros. There’s nothing stopping you from using the very same tools on Windows, or close substitutes. And OS X has all these tools as well, as does most any other UNIX, albeit with different syntaxes and options.
Which leads me to my tangential point: teaching Linux is fine, but it tends to have one of two effects. Either it leads people to thinking Linux is all there is, and they can’t do anything without it (very bad), or it leads people to say it sucks, and they never want to use it again (also very bad). Ultimately, it’s just a tool that does the same things as any other type of OS. The worst thing I’ve seen in college or in IT in general is people who treat these types of things as religious matters, rather than objectively via any technical or business means.
Like I said, it’s at best a tangent to the original article, but it’s the one thing I think of anytime I see someone talking about teaching Linux in college environments…
