alexc@dartvax.UUCP (Alex Colvin) (10/10/84)
Some remarks made here recently reflect an attitude that u--x & its clones are the universal operating systems, that everyone should have used. I have run into this attitude before. It bothers me. I expect that there are a lot of serious programmers, a few of whom may even be CS students, who have not been exposed to u--x. I expect some of them wouldn't care for it. Not only is it hope- lessly inadequate in some areas, but it is not intended as a general-purpose system. It succeeds at what it does by not at- tempting to solve everyone's problems. There are a number of decent operating systems out there that people use, including the null one. I would be suspicious of anyone who had ONLY u--x exposure. Such a one would be unexposed to APL, SNOBOL, ALGOL, etc. For that matter, to almost anything but C. U--x lacks implementations of many significant languages, and those that do exist are generally substandard. A phenomenon I noticed once is that most folks are using such aw- ful operating systems that they don't realize what they're miss- ing until they use u--x, after which they become dedicated UN*X- heads, seeing everything in u--x terms. It's very hard to tell someone like that that someone else does something better. They've seen perfection. This resembles the effect that APL and FORTH have on folks who are used to FORTRAN. I understand that even C sometimes has this effect, though I find that scarcely credible. U--x is a 15-year-old operating system. Has there been no pro- gress? Better that someone be conversant with a variety of operating systems, programming languages, and (natural) languages. Finally, as a former CS student, I advise you to take any degree with a little salt. After all, my alma mater (not here) doesn't even have a language requirement for the CS Ph.D. alexc@dartmouth alexc%dartmouth@csnet-relay ...dartvax!alexc Alex Colvin
ron@brl-tgr.ARPA (Ron Natalie <ron>) (10/10/84)
Your comments are in violent agreement with the previous ones. Anyone who graduates with a CS degree these days and hasn't learned at least a little about UNIX shows the major problem with places claiming to have a computer science department. Any serious Operating Systems program would have case studies of several operating systems (of course when I was studying it was stuff like VM and EXEC-8). However, as prominent as UNIX is, and the fact that it is an approach rather than an implementation (many people argue that the implementation sucks), it should be part of the curriculum. It is amazing that you can still get CS grads who only know the PASCAL on the O/S that they were allowed to use, and not any kind of diversity. The ACM attempts to reform this are meeting with dissent from the chincier CS departments. -Ron
herbie@watdcsu.UUCP (Herb Chong, Computing Services) (10/11/84)
For those who are interested and haven't seen it yet, Datamation's
August issue has what is, by consensus, the large systems manager's
viewpoint on Unix and its future. I'm sure that a lot of people are
going to be upset at the contents of the different reports, but I'm
a person who has used Unix and other systems a lot. I have been a systems
programmer on IBM MVS systems, and I do a lot of work on IBM VM/SP systems
too, as well as the work I do on Unix. Each system has its faults and I
don't think that any does everything well. It is not unusual to find
CS grads, even here at Waterloo, to have minimal exposure to Unix. Most
of our student computing is done on our VM/CMS system. We have a turnover
of nearly 8,000 userid's every school term. I'm not sure how many Unix
systems we would have to run to make up the load. And as for user friendliness,at the risk of many flames, Unix is a jungle for the new computer user,
let alone a complete novice. We also have a Honeywell system where some
undergraduate computing is done, but Unix is mostly reserved for hackers
who can talk their way into an account or graduate research.
Herb...
Once a hack, always a hack...
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