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Microsoft Is Indoctrinating Children, Shouldn't We?
wildgift writes: "This is probably not news to some young people, but some of the older people here should be aware that Microsoft runs a wide ranging IT/Programming curriculum project, called Mainfunction, that teaches young people to program using Microsoft tools. The obvious issue is: is anyone leveraging the education-friendly Unix environment to create a similar program? This is a huge opportunity. So far, I've only found this Python article." If Microsoft is getting their tools in the hands of the programmers of the future, what can we do to achieve the same? Wouldn't it be much better if kids could take a look at development on several different platforms so that they can better use the technology when they are professionals rather than settling on "what they know"?
Indeed. The 'Us vs. Them' attitude is the basis of all religious cults.
You've never edited sendmail.cf, have you?
Yes! It's time that we geeks start thinking of the children, too! Would you please think of the sweet, little and innocent children being hideously corrupted by the evil software from Redmond!
I work in a hardware compatibilty lab for a company that supplies parts for Compaq systems. All I have to say is that your very lucky to have as few hardware problems as you have had. Compaq systems are problems right out of the box. The ones we purchase rarely work for us. We have a very hard time getting Win2000 or ME to install properly. NT4 usually works but you can't use any of there bonus hardware. Also, because they buy the lowest quality hardware they can they usually end up with small hardware problems that tne end user will never know about. For example, they use Micron memory wich is known to have problems in linux anyways, plus they usually use in house motherboards. What this means is that they build there own equipment and for those of you that think that is good you might want to lookup Dell, or some IBM systems. They have problems because they use a lot of non-standard hardware. Compaq and Dell both use a riser card. This means that you can never get an ATX motherboard into there case. Dell even goes as far as to use non ATX power supplies.
Before you complain about the quality of linux you might want to look at the quality of your hardware. I have installed Windows 98, ME, 2000 and NT on just about every computer out there and have found that Compaq and Dell seem to give the most fits. You add the fact that Linux puts a little more stress on the system hardware and you have a bad situation from the start.
Next time, build your own system or go to a local computer shop that will use normal hardware. Buying a Dell, Compaq, or IBM is like playing Russian roulette. If you use there system as-is out of the box it will run great, but if you plan on doing your own thing you will run into problems.
> So what are the basics?
:-) ).
Algorithmics. Modelisation.
> For example:
> Open MS VC++
> Create a "Win32 Console App" project.
This recall me the hundreds of posts on comp.lang.c asking where was conio.h under unix.
You can learn development on a windows box. You can write portable programs with it. But rest assured that Microsoft have a vested interest at bluring the lines between Algorithmics, Standardized Langages and Microsoft proprietary stuff.
And teachers will do what is the easiest for them So you can be sure that the majority of students will learn that you should include windows.h before doing anything in a C program. (Not a bad thing anyway. Loosers will stay on windows, good developers can use any system regardless of where they learnt
Cheers,
--fred
Here's the entire session with Python
C:\>python
Python 2.0 (#8, Oct 16 2000, 17:27:58) [MSC 32 bit (Intel)] on win32
Type "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> print "Hello World"
Hello World
>>>
And that was on Windows too :)
"You know you want me baby!" - Crow T Robot
He never said a database-style file. It could just as easily be a set of document templates (eg. searching for "Copyright 1999" or somesuch).
There are other things Windows can't do, also. For instance, it's mighty odd to have a PPP device that ONLY WORKS ON A MODEM. Yes, you have other serial devices -- but if you want it to work on a raw serial port, you need to install extra software. Heaven forbit wanting to tunnel PPP (carrying, say, IPX) over a telnet or ssh connection! You get to write a telnet app that looks like a modem driver! For joy!
I won't even get started on the fscked up VPN technologies included with Win2K (let's just say that *requiring* L2TP on all IPSec connections, and refusing to acknowledge most of the authentication methods in the protocol, isn't a good way to make friends).
Oh, yes, when you want to find all lines in a file with "1999", change all "1999" to "2000", and sort the result, instead of using three Unix commands piped together it's so much easier with Windows to...um... what?
Anyhow, while 99% of unstructured data is locked up in binary formats with special APIs on Windows, that doesn't mean that it's so elsewhere -- in my Unix-centric experience it's much closer to 25/75 in favor of textual data. Anyhow, what is accessible to standard output is quite arbitrary -- on UNIX, any stream can be fed through a pipe. A network stream, a device's I/O, anything. I've even seen several apps here that have XML versions of their proprietary protocols to ease debugging/monitoring (I think some ORBs can do this also), and so having good tools for working with text certainly can be relevant -- trust me, when you've got 'em, you find uses for 'em.
As for the PPP thing being a random flamebot thing... if the subject of the thread was general OS flexability, I think it's at least somewhat relevant. Anyhow, I wasn't just regurgitating some random complaint that I heard someone else have -- this one's actually out of my own experience.
I think it's approaching criminal neglect to foist any of this crap on young minds. If they gravitate to it, fine. Otherwise let them play with wooden blocks fer Christ sake....
The revolution will NOT be televised.
Again missapplied, IMO.
I think the "law" is at best a rule of thumb, and discernment should be used to see if the law is properly applied. Should a discussion of National Socialisim be slammed because of Godwin's law?
The idea behind that "law" is if the discussion degenerates to namecalling and innappropriate application/comparisons of Hitler, National Socialism, etc, then Godwin's Law applies, IMO.
Basically you slammed an analogy that showed that Microsoft wasn't the first. Maybe it brings the thought in the reader a comparison that Apple, MS and National Socialism are the same thing, I disagree, basically it shows a basic principle that getting kids to know you and like you when they are young, you for the most part get their mindshare to adulthood. It's a commonly known principle which has been around for millennia.
If that person said "tobacco companies", it would be an equally valid comparison, but no one could slam Godwin's law on that because Godwin's law only mentions discussions about a particular group of wacked-out Germans, but it isn't worded to provide for the stifling of discusion on communism, alcohol, tobacco, drugs, fascism or even the entertainment industry.
Besides, the actual death count of WWII is around 60 million, with the USSR loosing something like 27M, generally agreed by historians to be a result of wholesale mismanagement, like troops getting the wrong size bullets, etc.
It seems "predatory capitalism" works equally well under either party. The US president is mostly a figurehead in economic matters anyways.
Any discussion on Slashdot, no matter how serious, is going to degenerate into trollbait no matter what.
So you got one bad AC comment, that doesn't really prove the point as IMO it was still misapplied. I don't think Goodwin's / Godwin's law really plays into factor at slashdot as EVERY discussion degenerates into trollbait at somepoint, yet if you look at some of the discussion since then, there was still a positive discussion going on. I mean you get totally random responses that link to goatse.cx, First Post! disgusting ASCII art or just plain profane responses that don't even try to go a half arsed job of proving their point, just slam the other guy's opinion!
Such is the nature of Slashdot. This site didn't seem to be like that from the start, but gradually the moderation system had to be implemented or else no one would bother reading posts. I know I didn't for a long time.
Well, 90% of the kids learning on Macs and later moving to Windows will be using MS Office on either platform - and if they can't cope with the extra mouse button, then they are probably beyond hope anyway :)
The key question, though, is what schools should teach: Is it training - how to use WordProcessor 2.1.3.1b on OperatingSystem 17.2.1.a - or education - How does a computer work? How do I program it? What makes good programs? What are the essentials of Computer Science?
If the former, then MS products are obviously the right thing to use, since training should focus on immediately applicable skills. If it's education you are after, then the OS is less important, but exposure to variety of systems helps.
no taxation without representation!
Your six year old daughter is learning POKER? Well, at least she's getting a headstart on the really important skills in life! :)
no taxation without representation!
Well, things like the NIC (http://www.thinknic.com) sound like a solution to the latter problem: Linux based, but with support for Windows terminal server, cheap ($199 w/o monitor) and virus proof - sounds like a perfect option for an educational environment to me.
no taxation without representation!
It was such fun...until it expired. We need more good stuff like that for Macs.
teleny, friend of cats.
Do what I did to get them off your backs. Move house. That way they annoy someone else and leave you alone. Win win situation.
Nerd: Derogatory term typically directed at anybody with a lower Slashdot ID than you.
Linux's biggest disadvantage in the education environment is really two fold.
1) It's still to hard for beginning users to use. Linux needs to make inroads not only in the CS/EE world but especially the business community. You MUST remember who cuts the checks to buy software. Make sure the accountants know and love Linux/Unix whatever your flavor is.
2) It's really hard to prevent a unified front. The Linux community is really fairly splintered. And all the other communities pale in comparison to that presented by Microsoft. New users are presented with a many faceted view of Linux while those being introduced to Windows are not. Microsoft has a huge advantage in that it can present a unified "front" to inductees.
It's all basic marketting. Pretty simple. There's no complex combination that will win.
All this arguing about programming languages, what box to build etc. All pointless. The front presented must be uniform and comfortable. The few people I have seen try to teach Linux are it's largest enemies. They (like MS people) are so convinced they are right that they disgust everyone. At least when teaching a Windows app some people know it and will call the "teacher" when he/she is a dick.
Kids will naturally drift to non-ms compilers due to the cost of microsoft compilers and all. All we need to do is hype egcs to them, and they will first try it out using cygwin, and maybe try unix, because as we all know, cygwin is for strictly porting :)
-LW
I wonder how many 17 year olds like my self are MCSEs....
You have to hand it to MS, at the university that I attend, they gave free copies of Visual Studio to every student in the intro level cs courses. It's no skin off of their back, because we would have probably all just pirated it and it got a lot of us hooked on them quite quickly.
Either that or the cost of Visual Studio is included as part of your tuition.
God, I wish I could find the link that was posted here about students from some schools finding out the costs of their "free" MS Office CDs was in fact buried in their tuition bill. (In other words, if you didn't take the "free" CD you paid for it anyways!)
Jay (=
If Apple's tactics didn't work, then why are all us Naz... I mean us Mac users still so loyal? ;)
Mod down posts with a "Free Mac Mini/iPod" sig, they're spam!
I'm just curious, did you consider switching schools? Not all university CS programs are bad. I go to UW-Milwaukee and our program is fairly excellent. I've learned a lot, it's enjoyable, and we have people with actual clue.
Mod down posts with a "Free Mac Mini/iPod" sig, they're spam!
Um, no. If you replace 'Open MS VC++/Create a "Win32 Console App" project' with "open a text editor", and replace "Then hit run" with "save as temp.c, run gcc temp.c, and run a.out", it is exactly the same (well, except for the extra \r, and I would have used the parameter char** argv, but that's more of a style issue).
But that's not how I'd recommend anyone learn programming concepts even on Unix. Personally I got started with Logo on an Apple IIc, and totally fell in love with being able to create a structured list of commands and then have the machine carry them out. Along the way I learned about basic control and I/O functions, without having to learn memory management, pointers, and so forth. In contrast, my freshman year C course was a nightmare (at least until we learned how to debug).
My recommendation for teaching elementary and high-school students would be Logo and/or LISP. LISP encapsulates every kind of construct and data structure which you will see writing real programs, and some features which are just cool but don't exist in the real world outside of Perl. Only once the student has grasped the essential concepts of programming, should we throw them to the lions of C and C++, where they have to learn the nuts-and-bolts like pointers, etc.
To get back to the original poster's comment, the reason why Unix is superior to Microsoft for learning about and using the OS is because of the superior number and availability of simple command-line tools that can be combined together, along with a set of config files that anyone can read (and usually understand if they read the man page).
Your right to not believe: Americans United for Separation of Church and
OK, how much of the daily usage of your computer consists of interaction with web sites, etc., compared to five or even ten years ago? How many people have bought PCs in the last five years just so they could get on the Internet?
Therefore, the current trend for the majority of people is to rely less and less on OS-dependent software and more and more on OS-independent software that runs off of a network. The trend shows no signs of stopping.
I know, I know, consumer desktops aren't "real programming". But I would wager that even in the business world interoperability has become more and more important in the last ten years rather than less so, as companies move from their one-size-fits-all mainframes to a combination of big iron, Unix servers, and miscellaneous NT and Linux boxes. Maybe the majority of "real programming" takes place confined to one OS or platform, but at this point you can do almost all of the same sorts of programming on all of the major OS and platforms.
Your right to not believe: Americans United for Separation of Church and
Hey, maybe we could release some of our best
software for free, and working on most platforms.
This is having effect. Look at the public school
system in Mexico that has been reported as
adopting Linux. There are many other, similar
programs out there.
What would be interesting would be if Microsoft's
efforts (in the USA?) and various nations' use of
Linux and other open-source systems creates a
national rift. You could conceive of polarization
where MS-based programming concentrates
somewhat in the USA and open development
concentrates elsewhere.
>How is learning motif easier then the mfc classes? :-) I admit windows98 sucks goatballs
-snip-
>Have you seen windows2000? It is the most stable Micrsoft product ever invented since os/2.
-snip-
>Also Motif and the nasty news/x windows crap is terrible to get anything done with it. A well respecting computer scientist said programming in motif is like building a bookshelf out of mashed potatoes.
-snip-
>Comparing windows 3.0 and the early releases of com and ole to today's technogolies is not a fair one.
It's very unfair to bring up Motif while repeatedly asking to compair Win 2k with Linux instead of Win 9x and Win 3.x
Motif is one widget set... Sence Athena there hasn't been much need for Motif...
Now a days we use GTK and QT
Motif is pritty much dead...
On the other hand Windows 98 is alive and well..
If you want to code for Windows you need to code for Windows 98...
Windows NT and 2K are supper bitchen desktops.. But they are sold as servers and workstations.
As servers they have a GUI.. the GUI is in kernel space so it can't even be swapped out when the GUI is idle.
The net result is to run your server you need.. a mouse.. a keyboard.. and a monitor...
A server should run headless.. no mouse, no keyboard.. no monitor..
To access the server you use a workstation..
(the exeption is when you have ONE server.. but if you have 20 servers then 20 keyboards, mice and monitors is a roial mess... or you can KVM but thats still 20 video cards..)
Now Win 2K/NT as a workstation dosen't make an effort to be compatable with the servers that are out there. Thats not good. A good workstation should be able to work with what exists. It shouldn't dump on the server the need for compatability..
The server dose to much allready to run compatability daemons for workstations or run a GUI..
Where Win 2k/NT is super pimp is in the home/desktop market....
Microsoft dosn't market it to that market.. So noone uses them as home/desktop machimes.
So writing code for them is a bit moot...
>Windows is far more easier to use.
Even with Win2k I STRONGLY disagree...
Windows menus are every bit as cryptic as the Unix command line...
BSD has a smaller learnning curve... than Windows... Linux has a larger learnning curve..
But Windows learnning curve is there...
I blame the learnning curve on Linux for the lack of manuals.. all text docs.. you touched on that. Windows comes shipped with a manual.. Linux dosn't. I keep being told "man pages" but... no... I have the AT&T manuals and this makes life MUCH easyer... But not quite as easy as I'd like.
ORA books include a good selection of Linux books and I recomend those over the text...
I have a termal printer for printing text docs.. There is just nothing better than having it on paper.
>I believe for myself its time to put linux back int he computer room where its strenght is and put windows back on my computer.
Sadly Win NT and 2K don't go on your computer.. they only exist in the computer room. The software for the home users are for 9x...
Linux however is marketted for home , workstation and server as well as imbeded markets...
As such Linux has software in thies markets.
As long as Win NT and 2K are marketted for the computer room... and not the user market.. they won't have the software...
Now to back off from badmouthing Microsoft...
Windows 98 is supper bitchen for compatability.. for running the older apps.. for people who wish to continue to run the same old software they allways ran.. Basicly people who still like Dos.. thats a very small slice of the market but they are alive and well.. Otherwise DosEmu and FreeDos would be dead... CP/M lived in emulation up to like the mid 1990s.. As long as you can keep Dos/Windows reasonably current.. bitchen.. for the users who what it... They do exist.. Remember.. mainframes from the 1950s were tossed becouse they had the Y2K bug.. and no other reason...
Dos has a Y2K bug but Windows 98 dosn't... supper bitchen... and you can't run Dos alone anymore becouse you need net access etc so the whole thing makes sence as a Dos lovers dream...
Windows 2K/NT for the user space.. but Microsoft dosn't market it that way... It's a super bitchen desktop... cryptic but people honnestly don't give a rats ass.. at least not in that market...
Linux is more the hobbyest.. deployed everywhere.. it can do everything... but if you want a fine tooned system... Linux is NOT it... even in the server market....
The inventors dream.. When your doing something nobody else did before you'd rather have an os that you can modify and keep it quiet... SHHH.. top secret.. No talking with Microsoft...
Annother problem you mentioned was RPM packages... RedHat... Lot's of talk about Linux stability... RedHat isn't in that talk... RedHat isn't even Win 98.. Unstable for no reason at all.. good bad or just plain lame.. Not even a viable excuse.. "We wanted to" is all they can give us. Pathetic..
Anyway your better of installing from source... no this isn't easyer than Microsofts package installation... but for user friendly binary installs look to RealPlayer and ID softwares Quake 3... They include a binary installer..
Much better than RPMs....
Stay way from RedHat..
Microsoft has some pritty pimpen tech but they market them to the WRONG markets.
I don't actually exist.
The result: windos support is there as soon as the hardware is released, but Linux support doesn't come until the hardware has been out, and bought by someone with the time and talent to put together Linux support.
because along with the stack of operating systems I've collected I also have the BeOS 5 Pro that I picked up at BestBuy when it was on sale. Although I haven't installed it on the Athlon system, it has always worked just fine on the Desqpro 2000 that also gave Linux fits.
A version of BeOS from 2000 on a 1997 machine, compared with versions of Linux from 1997 on the 1997 machine and from 2000 on a 2000 machine? Or did i miss something in your argument?
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--
perl -e'$_=shift;die eval' '"$^X $0\047\$_=shift;die eval\047 \047$_\047"' at -e line 1.
"I believe that a truly dedicated kid, one who enjoys programming, will devour (or at least try) every new development environment they come across. "
This is true, and seems to be a common viewpoint on this thread, but neglects an important point - these truly dedicated kids will maybe form 1% of programmers, and the other 99% or so of programmers will learn through the usual means, like studying at university, and then go out to produce far far more software *for windows* than that other 1% will ever hope to produce for unix/linux.
Linux needs to be attractive to *many* programmers, not just a tiny handful who love to thinker and will find unix automatically.
Oh sorry, I forgot that a true Linux fan never points out the areas in which Linux is behind and can be improved. A true Linux fan insists that Linux is superior in whatever regard, no matter what the evidence ..
It seems to me it is more likely to help my post's argument to mention I'm a Linux fan; I really do want Linux to succeed, but I am realistic about acknowledging it's weaknesses, rather than rabidly defending Linux to it's death. That is the only way to improve a product - to acknowledge it's weak points. I develop mainly on Windows for a living, and I hate Windows, I would much rather be doing the type of work I'm doing now on Linux, but Linux just is not up to scratch on nearly enough fronts to be viable for our clients or us. I'm not just some Microsoft product lover who doesn't really know much about Linux, which is the main reason I mentioned it. I've done quite a lot of Linux development, both for myself and some for work. I've got quite a lot of experience with emacs/makefiles etc, and sorry, but I'm much more productive in Visual Studio. And no, I don't use the mouse for anything, keyboard shortcuts for both. It's a better product. Let's all stop this religous crap and just admit it, so that we can focus on doing what needs to be done to improve it.
It's like the mindcraft tests that showed NT/IIS faster than Apache. Everybody cried foul, insisting the tests were rigged, and that Linux was much better. So the tests were repeated in a fair way, and it turned out NT/IIS was actually faster. Only then did some people actually start to acknowledge that there were parts of the networking stuff that could be sped up in Linux, and they used that to actually improve Linux, but this only happened because these people were willing to admit that it could be better.
What the hell are you talking about? There have been decent Java books from the beginning, published by Sun and O'Reilly.
--
Bush's assertion: there ought to be limits to freedom
I learned BASIC at age 5 on a PCjr. Read through that spiral bound book with the beige-ish cover entitled something like "Hands-on BASIC for the IBM PCjr".
I don't believe that learning BASIC screwed me over later on. Yes, BASIC is a somewhat screwed up language, especially the flavor that the IBM PCjr had without any concept of blocks of code or looping constructs. One of the main problems I had with BASIC is that as I became a better programmer, BASIC was not allowing me to do what I wanted to in an easy way. However, it does have the advantage that it somewhat resembles the english language, which is great for a newbie but gets in the way of an advanced programmer.
Modern versions of BASIC without line-numbers and the need to use GOTO just to do a loop or a block of code for the branch of an if statement may actually be a decent language to start with. I have an issue with arrays being indexed at 1 in BASIC which tends to lead the beginning programmer into a trap of off-by-one errors when he/she gets to more advanced languages. However you can for example specifically use "0 TO 9" to get an array of size 10 indexed at 0, but that also leads to a trap later since in most other languages you would specify "10" and not "0 to 9".
One thing about the PCjr's BASIC book is that it had some nice graphics/sound examples which made it a more interesting book because it fooled the reader into thinking that he/she was actually getting the computer to do something rather than going over programming theory.
I believe for a young kid, BASIC may be the way to go. However, for older students with some reasonable math experience and a decent attention span I see no reason not to start out with C++. I don't mean delving into objects and all that, but just starting with the basics. C++ has several classes to do common things and it's not necessary to know as a beginning programmer how it is done, just what it does. C++ is also a great language for doing data structures and implementing them as re-usable classes. However C++ does not quite have the instant gratification that BASIC does. Doing cool stuff like graphics/sound is usually not very easy in C++.
Another thing is that you probably shouldn't feed programming to anyone. Programming is something you really have to want to learn or you will not be any good at it.
I would suggest a very easy QBASIC book and the standard copy of QBASIC that I believe you can still find on a win9x CD. I would suggest doing the first few chapters with your son/daughter and then see if he/she takes off and starts learning on his/her own. I remember my dad trying to remember DOS commands when we first got the computer. It was actually funny as hell watching him type things and get "Bad command or filename" because he didn't know which commands to type (at least for a 5-year-old). I believe I was better than my dad at getting around DOS and programming in BASIC in a matter of weeks. What I didn't know until much later was that in his day he was actually a damn good programmer. Ironically, my mom is now better at using a PC than my dad is.
-Dave
Relying on debuggers is a bad habit, and it is didactically bad for systems like Visual C++ to make it so easy.
Depends... most people will work on maintaining old code (which sucks, but is the meat of a programming career, unless you're very fortunate).
While I agree about Assertions, a good debugger can be *invaluable* when you're dealing with old, sloppily written code that you have to maintain.
Simon
Coming soon - pyrogyra
It's just my opinion of course, but I think a command line shell is just a better idea, it gives them the right mental image. That snippet of code you posted (I'm assuming slashdot stripped out the stdio.h after #include)
Yup
would work on both systems, but the program would be a lot more bloated on windows.
IIRC, it takes about 2Kb of space when compiled -- and that's including the linker relocation symbols.
Where is the code that defines the window geometry?
It's not a part of console apps; they just pop up -- like an xterm -- and the app writes to the stream. If you need a curses style environment, you can grab the console handle and write directly to a text-buffer -- but it's not necessary.
I'm assuming MS just adds it to the executable, but what happens when we want them to code in a more complex environment? If you hold their hand too much they won't learn the basics, and we'll just have a generation of programmers who only know "visual" languages.
Nope - about the only wrapping that MS does for a console app is to (a) create a console, (b) bind STDIN, STDOUT and STDERR to the correct streams, and parse the commandline before passing it into the app.
That's it.
Simon
Coming soon - pyrogyra
*grins* I've been using way too much java recently. :) Swapping languages makes you go crosseyed.
Simon
Coming soon - pyrogyra
Smalltalk - it was originally built for kids.
The children (and their teachers, who are too often not that much older) should have _teaching_ aids for spelling and especially grammar and style. One does especially miss the Grammatik plug-in.... Buy your kids copies of Strunk & White (and all the really good, well-written, even "classic" books you can find and somehow afford).
most people dont realize this, but alot of people here use computers because of microsoft. it was bill's mission to put a pc in every home, and this introduced alot of us to computers. alot of these people realized that there was more that could be done with them, and that is where i would think alot of the /. crowd comes from.
his mission should have been to put a pc inevery home and keep unix out of every home.
you can use this programming drive simularly. after these kids get tired of making buttons in vb, the ones that are interested will want to get more out of their computers. they may read about linux in some magazine and see some screen shots of it on the net.... this is where the grass roots campaign comes in. local LUGs will be there to support the curious. this will leave microsoft with those satisfied by the flashey slow graphics vb can provide. this is sort of a darwinistic approach, but it is how i think it will go.
john
-- john
hey. when you start a project on sourceforge you get shell (ssh) access along with storage and web space. i would assume that they have gcc and other stuff there. it might be worth it to look into this. i dont know if you have to start a project in order to get shell access. i just started using it after i started one.
john
-- john
Frankly, at that level, they should be teaching programming concepts using an environment that gives immediate gratification.
Squeak is an excellent modern example of Smalltalk-80, which was invented for just this purpose.
(probably too late to post this, but here goes) I'm in a couse (Cisco Networking) working for the CCNA, and we deal mostly in WinNT. We're also probably going to get MCSE before the years end. However even though the course is mainly Cisco/MS, and the course description in the Course Description Guide (original name, huh?) mentions only Win95/98/2k/NT and Cisco, we're still going to learn how to setup Linux/Unix boxes and take care of them too. Uh, oh yeah, a point, um. I guess just cuz they use MS stuff doesn't necessarily mean they're learning solely to use MS stuff. And if they are, so what? A lot of non-geek people could care less if their OS was free or not, as the jobs they can get with their certifications and experience and all that jibbajabba will probably provide them with all the software they need anyways. And no, I'm not against open source, just to me it seems too many people are elitists and preachers that anything that isn't free and open sucks. And lastly, I do have Linux on my laptop... And I have Win98 too.
One thing 'we' do that Microsoft doesn't is make the Unix programming tools available to anyone who wants them for free. (Ms's academic licences for VIsual Studio is $249 for the complete package, $99 for individual components) Younger kids are usually relentless about getting what they want. If they want to program They'd get their hands on something like djgpp or cygwin (assuming they're still on an M$-based system) Once they realize that these tools come from the unix world, and that they work better in a unix world, they will try to install a unix-based OS, and Tinker with that. '
As Linux hackers continue to make Linux easier to use, The transition from M$-based OSes becomes easier and easier.
Why aren't you encrypting your e-mail?
And *who* made the decision to install linux on your 6 year old daughter's box??
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
Haven't touched a real computer game in maybe 6 years (freshman in college now), so Linux was a no-brainer. Of course, now I have slashdot to suck away all my productivity instead...
"If you look 'round the table and can't tell who the sucker is, it's you." -- Quiz Show
That's the same book that I used. I even bought the $75 basic cartidge. The one that called randomization "black magic" to avoid explaining how the computer did it. I stopped programming because as I got into bigger and bigger programs I would lose the big picture, get confused as it became more difficult to keep track of things I would lose interest.
I'll check out Qbasic though.
We have an interesting demographic in our company:
The product the engieering team is working on is 100% Java server-side web stuff, using Apache and JServ, with dev environment scripting in Perl; developers do not have to support their own databases (IT group does that off a Sun box), and the parts of the production infrastructure that require Unix are also centrally supported on the office network, so it is easily possible to work on any platform and toolset, and we offer a choice of NT (currently 4/2000) or Linux (currently RH6.2/RH7). The only common ground tool requirement (apart from a Java compiler) that is mandated is CVS.
The production system runs on a multi-tiered Unix-only cluster (FreeBSD, Linux, Solaris).
About 1/4 of the engineering team use Linux. Most use it "pure" with no VMware fallback. I use it with VMware, which I use for PowerPoint (StarPresenter sucks) and IE (for comaptibility testing)
About 1/4 of them use Windows, with a Windows style environment, e.g. JBuilder and File Manager.
Most of the other half use the Windows OS, but with a purely "Unix" environment based on the GNU toolset; emacs, make, bash, textutils and binutils, jdb inside emacs, etc.
The resons cited for the last choice are varied, but basically boil down to availability of gadgetry - Quake runs better (before the flames start, these are basic office Dell boxes with 2D video); MS-Office is better integrated to Outlook/IE than StarOffice is to Netscape; there are a million and one little things you can download that just point and click on Windows, and most of them do work on NT.
At my old job I once tried to create the "GNu on NT" setup for myself, but I'm much more of a power user of Unix stuff so I ended up reinstalling the machine with Red Hat (note the specific name and not Linux generically; the toolset that comes with a good distro is 3/4 of what makes Linux powerful).
It's widely accepted (probably even here) that Windows is better for the computer illiterate because of the compatibility infrastructure around it; what I think is new here is the fact that it appeals to developers too, who aren't so dependent on that infrastructure.
If Microsoft jumped off a bridge, would you do it to?
"The price of freedom is eternal vigilance." - Thomas Jefferson
Knows that programming specifically for one platform is a pipe dream. Any good programmer knows that; If these so called future programmers that Microsoft's teaches don't learn that; oh well. It doesn't really affect Unix or any other platform. The internet runs on unix and it has done so since its inception. I highly doubt they'd be any change in the amount of people needed for its up keep. Infact, if anything we will need more people for its up keep.
Well, not all Nvidia chips are supported. I think the Prophet has a GeForce2 chip, which doesn't appear in the list below.
/ xfree86_40bld095FAQ#Requirements
http://www.nvidia.com/Products/OpenLinuxDwn.nsf
2.1 Requirements
Hardware: NVIDIA TNT, TNT2, GeForce, or Quadro based graphics accelerator. The NVIDIA NV1 and RIVA 128/128ZX chips are supported in the base XFree86 4.0.x install and are not supported by
this driver set.
I can just see my 3rd grade daughter coming to me and saying, "Daddy, I asked on a newsgroup what was wrong with my code and somebody said RTFM. Is that one of those include files I'm supposed to use?" Yeah, friendly... Right.
As soon as I can find a place to put it, I'm going to set up an old box for my kids to start using, with a dual boot for Win95 and Linux (Slackware, if you care about that sort of thing). And for my oldest, the 3rd grader, I'm going to be encouraging her to get her feet wet with programming on the Linux side. But that experience will be "friendly" to her because I'll be there to "hold her hand" through coding problems, not because of anything about Linux itself.
(FWIW, I will probably start her with shell scripting, not compiled C code. IMHO, it's a simpler thing to get accustomed to the idea of giving ordered commands to the computer than trying to understand functions, compiling, etc. In that sense, it's more like the original numbered-line BASIC, where you don't need the complexity of subroutines until you're familiar with just giving sequential instructions.)
I think the *nix environment is the right one for kids to start in for a variety of reasons -- but "friendliness" is not one of them. It has a ways to go before it is truly friendly to the ultimate novice. Just as we don't teach elementary school kids math by plunking down a comprehensive reference book and saying "RTFM" so should we also not expect to plunk them down with a set of HOWTOs and say "RTFM."
No Laughing Allowed!
From console, after I fscked up my Linux partition by playing with inittab and booted from floppy: /dev/hda1 /mnt /lost+found and copy them back to etc with the correct filenames...actually made it work, too, to my great surprise.)
# mnt
# cd etc
# ls
# jed inittab.conf
(jed not found--remind me to roll my own rescue disk sometime)
# vi inittab.conf
(fix two fscked up lines)
init 6
(reboot, it works)
(I'll save the details of the time I fscked up the disk and had to look at lost nodes in
After a similar experience with a fscked up registry in Windows (and this time, it wasn't my fault--some program had mysteriously been mucking around in there and trashed it), I found that the only thing I could do with regedit from the command line was to dump the registry to text...and even then, it wouldn't work consistantly. And after dumping it to text, I found that the MS-DOS editor wouldn't open it (file too large) and that I couldn't even reimport it as is (I forgot the error message, though).
So what, you ask, is the difference between mucking with the registry with regedit and mucking with text-based config files? The latter can be done from the command line after a box gets hosed; the former cannot. (Granted, I haven't tried Win2k's console mode to see if that would let me muck with the registry...I may have to try that sometime).
The above comment is mostly true but you have to remember that the situation with NT a (that any moron can call himself a "programmer" by dopping a few controls on a form) is by design. It comes from the long cherished beliefs of the windows world about pictures being superior to words for all possible tasks. That may be true in many cases from a usability standpoint and that too for people afraid of computers (probably a large majority of all users out there). But as soon as you want the computer to do anything more than those pretty pictorial programs provide for, you need to learn to use words (command line, shell scripting, programming languages etc.) And when it comes to using words, the traditional unix users are way ahead of the game. That's the reason why a grounding in Unix for aspiring computer professionals is inherently better than that in picture based environments like windows and macs. And that is the reason that microsoft making inroads into the educational market can be construed as a "Bad Thing(tm)" for the state of computer education.
"Even though its based on Microsoft software and such. It still might make persuade more kids into taking computer classes and heading into the computer industry at an early age."
;)
That's exactly what the IT industry needs and I agree with you. I started with an Apple IIc at an early age. It's what wet my appetite to get more into computers. Mind you, it wasn't the most 31337 of old sk00l computers.
"Once they have gained a stable base, most will more then likely go out on their own looking for things that interest them."
Exactly. Each one of us have taken a different path. A person can be guided, but ultimately I think a geek should follow his own path.
"Not to mention, how could one be computer literate these days and not know life outside of Microsoft."
Much easier than you can imagine. Yet that's slowly changing.
"On a last note. I would tend to think most middle school and high school computer teachers have not had much open source exsposure in their lives, mostly general computer use and programming. Once those teachers retire and new teachers that have "grown up with/grown along with" open source products will attitudes change as to what is tought."
Yeah, when I was in highschool our teachers were Math teachers that had some basic programming knowledge such as BASIC, Pascal, LOGO, Fortran and maybe a little C. A friend and I use to help teach the class since we tended to know more than our teachers.
Hopefully, this'll change in the coming years and there will be more and more knowledgeable teachers. The hard part will be luring those skilled in the IT industry to education - now and not later!
I've been looking at this issue lately, but from the perspective of the end user not the developer. I work for several community technology access centers and have recently begun to deploy RedHat on several machines to allow access to the internet.
The question I am interested in (and this is a little off topic, sorry) is: are community tech access centers doing their users disfavor by deploying open source software instead of standard-issue Win/Office setups? If one of the reasons these centers exist is to help users make the transition to the job market should they be using products like Word instead of AbiWord or StarOffice.? Or can the knowledge the user gains in learning on an Open Source setup be generalized to computer literacy in general.
I know that there are several TAC's using open source software. But these centers lean more towards providing internet access and not job training. I am mulling around the idea of using one or several of the centers I work for as test grounds for looking at this question (eg, one group uses MS software, another uses open source. Then find some way to objectively measure the job-readiness/computer literacy of the two groups--it's this latter part of the equation that I could certainly use some help in setting up).
If anyone knows where I can find more information on this issue, I'd really appreciate any feedback at sjwillis at yahoo dot com.
Thanks,
Jim
in the future. I have Borland C++ 3.1 for Windows 3.1 that I purchased 8 or 9 years ago. I haven't used it for 6 years or more. The same for Turbo Pascal version 3.0, 4.0 and 6.0. I can't even remember the last time I programmed in Pascal, maybe something like 10 years ago.
I don't see the rate of technology slowing and I don't see Universities giving up on Unix anytime soon. With that said, both MS tools and Unix as we know it today are going to be very different 10 years from now. So when your average MS indocratened 12-year actually becomes a programmer (at something like 22) ever MS tool or Unix tool they learned could be long gone.
I disagree. a HUGE majority of computer systems out there at the moment are unix based. This is not end user machines I'm talking about, I'm talking about corperate webservers, file servers, ftp servers, computing machines, and such, are unix based. I suggest you remove your head from your windows-loving ass before talking any more.
If I had not forgotten to remember that I am dead, I might have remembered not to forget to mourn my loss of life.
A year ago I would have agreed with it totally, but when my 15 year old brother came to visit my linux-only flat for a while... despite my best efforts, he preferred to be totally off-line instead of learn linux.
I myself, feel linux to be different and cool. Hip and stylish even. But I was bought up on an apple ][ and, later, DOS. Using linux wasn't difficult. But for someone who's first experience of computing was windows 95... it's hard to fathom even the concept of a command line!
Karma makes sense. It makes a lot more sense if you add reincarnation.
Good for you, and I know where you are coming from - school was a horrible impediment to my education. All that wasted time...
Linux and BSD are both Free, and run on the same hardware that runs windows. Of course, in your case, you may not have a machine with the requisite disk space available (or permission to delete the bugware to make room ;^) but in general *nix is becoming very accessible. A lot of schools have hardware that is considered obsolete in the 'doze world, but can still do marvelous things with Free *nix.
Free shells, of course, are not a bad idea either - and there are quite a few out there. Amber.org.uk used to run one, if that's changed look around... and btw, anyone reading this with a static connection and some excess horsepower, please consider opening your system up for educational guest accounts.
I don't think the UK is that backwards, surely? There are plenty of *nix oriented sites in the UK, LUGs and so forth... that said, IRC and electronic media are great resources also.
Good for you, and good luck to you.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
Isn't learning Microsoft code a form of Child Abuse?
I mean, really. Nice job, buddy. We have precious few women in technical jobs in the computer industry as it is, and with posts like yours it's not hard to see why.
To answer the original poster, it shouldn't be too hard to pick up old 486s and early Pentiums for next to nothing. Maybe check out some auctions, or see if a local business is throwing out old machines. Sure, they may not be state of the art, but they'll run Linux quite happily, and give you all you need to learn a lot about programming and how 'nix systems work.
It's not funny, it's a choice. I don't want to make people pay because I don't want them to think that I owe them something. I give the class for free, out of my own free time ... something like free as in beer.
:-)
But I also want people to understand the concept behind Free Software. The first class my students didn't undertstand why some programmers would do stuff for free. I said "look at me, I am teaching this class for free! I do it because I love it, because I want to do it and because I do not want money to corrupt the spirit". They understood Crystal Clear.
You pull $175/Hour. I usually don't pull money, I earn it. As of the figure, you'd be surprise what you can charge when you know your stuff
dudle
Looking for a great online backup: Green Backup
Improve the game-making tools, and make some Linux-only killer games. Then they'll come.
and you haven't felt the wrath of the spanish inquisition yet!
Voting Moo Anyway!
if you think mac users'll get problems with the extra button, just imagine a mac user trying a MS IME for the first time :)
Voting Moo Anyway!
i personally have given up on an unbiased article on /. (i haven't seen one ... in a year or more), and i've gotten my fair share of bashing BECAUSE of my more unbiased view on windows/linux.
:)
you've got a good point, namely that *what* system people use is irrelevant, as long as they get things done, and they find it fun.
people feel like using windows? fine. it obviously suits them better. people feel like using linux? fine. that means *that* solution is better for *them*. it's just like a car. some people like a glitzy car, some like a ferrari, some like a dodge viper etc.
i personally use both. win2k as a desktop os (win2k *is* better suited for that task, IMO), whereas linux is more a server/gateway/toy.
i *do* plan on trying out linux as a desktop os again in a few months (need to get a few pieces of hardware...), so i might re-evaluate things then. it's going to be fun seeing what differences there are from the last time i tried it (6 months ago or so).
i can't wait for the anti-ms replies either
Voting Moo Anyway!
Well, i'll assume "my boyfriend" should be all the clues you'd need (or there are other factors i'm currently not privvy to)... :)
Voting Moo Anyway!
ignore the ignorant heatens, for they know not what treasure they're offending.
instead, do what you can to repair the damage heathens like this cause.
Voting Moo Anyway!
"Not to mention, how could one be computer literate these days and not know life outside of Microsoft."
I wish this was true, but the truth is that many people do not know what linux is, even system admins, it is sad but true, some people just don't care!
I totally agree, as one of my non geek friends put it "People use windows for the pretty colors"
It is a sad truth, and I am not saying linux is not as or even more nice as windows (I have E with the aqua theme, that is what I call nice!), however, windows users see it that way
If you think this is a problem for schools we also have the same problems in some uni's over here in the UK!
I have a friend, he was using Linux before he left but now he is totally a windows guy, it is not like he is enjoying using windows, he hates it, but he still loves windows!
I think there has to be some kind of mind bending program going on here!
I think that event if they try to 'indocrtinate' children, they will, growing, go see other things with adolescence. So, I think it's the good point. One of the best friends I have, really cool and good linux coder and interested since a long time (remember 1.2 kernels), has first begun programming on Windows. When he discovered Linux :)....
glop
Wouldn't that be the same as saying, " Hey, now that you learned C++, you need to learn to program the same thing in ANSI C, and then rewrite it for Delphi so you can broaden your programming skills"? I think you are sticking to the Microsoft Assimilation factor a little too much, here (Can that actually be done?). I think it would be great to have lots of natural programmers around, but some of us non-programmers don't wanna have 10 differnent languages to learn just for the sake of having a "broad programming base."
--Chemguru
this is going to be incredibly hard to do because of the age factor. I mean who wants to sit down infront of a linux box and program some code for a console based, more than likely monochrome display program when they can sit down in front of a windows machine and using visual basic design something that has colors, pictures, sounds, etc much more easily? I won't like and I'm not afraid to admit it - oh though I use Linux on a daily basis I enjoyed my beginning Visual Basic class than my beginning C(++) class.
-neil
"Now you see that evil will always triumph because good is dumb."
Apple tried this. It was a colossal failure. Apple surrounded kids with Apple equipment and software in the hopes that they would be hooked and buy Apple when they left school and went into the real world. Kids largely had the attitude that they were using kids computers and left them behind along with kids' text books and kids' lunch boxes. With any luck, microsoft will push it's software to kids till they are convinced that microsoft just makes kids' software.
I know when i frist took a programming class i was required to buy Masm and unfortunatly i registered it, and to this day i continually get mail from MS. come to this dev convention get this student software. the only really funny part about it is that i'm sure that they have no clue what i do for a kliving and could be someone who took one programming class.(of course not likely with asm but oh well)
A blog about stuff.
The lack of kid-oriented software (free and non-free) will keep Linux out of Elementary Schools. The teachers can go to a computer store and buy a CD, install and go with windows and Mac. There is no easy way for a teacher, who may not be very proficient with computers, to do the same thing with Linux.
To a shark, you are just another food choice...
At my university, the students are REQUIRED to use MS Visual Studio. Most of the programs are turned in in both binary and source format(s).
I tried to convince them to allow other compilers/operating systems; they said 'sure'. What ended up happening is I was down-graded for NOT using Visual Studio, and NOT using WIN32. "Because that's what the industry uses"
And, the CS department is . . . extremely stubborn on this point. They dropped all their UNIX/VMS - anything not Win32 based.
Were I a CS major, I would be upset about this narrow-mindedness. But I'm a Computer-Engineering major, and my coursework requires programming in other environments, operating systems, etc. And this pig-headed Win32 only attitude both enrages me, and is a serious problem to my education. Does anybody have any suggestions about what to do to get the department to change their position?
(And petitions from the FSF/GNU Linux club hasn't helped at all...)
I want to learn to use the typical UNIX ways: Makefiles, text-editors, etc. While an IDE is nice, I would like to be able to program without one.
But, sadly, finding a decent HOWTO on makefiles is difficult, and I haven't had enough time to find one; let alone read it.
-- Sometimes you have to turn the lights off in order to see.
IT/IS directors and admins for many school boards like the ability to buy a system/OS that meets their schools needs out of the ups box, so where are the cheap prebuilt linux boxes? Linux is for the enthusiast at this juncture, hence the prebuilders build "workstations" in the old sense.
Windows boxen can be ordered from a great many providers, at any level of power, for a wide variety of prices, or even leased, which is particulary valuable to school districts, as the upgrade schedule is maintained. Find a business that leases linux boxes and support, and they could do it, but I don't know of anyone out there yet
Read my plan to save the Bengals
a poor MSCE and a healthy dose of reboot/reformat/reinstall usually works for most windeows boxen
Read my plan to save the Bengals
You've got that right. Word has gotten shittier and more annoying in every version. I really liked version six, which I think was the first one to include the feature that underlines misspelled words as you type. That was the last useful thing they added.
After that they started adding a lot more crap to second guess the user. Now it's just as annoying as Wordperfect, but without control codes so you can't even fix the problems Word introduces half the time.
What I'd really like to see in a future version of Windows is some option you can click that says "I know what I'm doing, don't try to second guess me, ever. Don't reformat my documents, don't ask me if I really meant to move a file, and most of all, don't second guess what I'm trying to select with the mouse cursor".
This in itself regularly sends me into insane rages. Some programs, like Textpad, are smart enough to have an option to turn off Windows cursor behaviour, but most aren't.
Not a bad idea (if you recall, Hitler ran a similar campaign)
This kind of thing happens everywhere, from the My First Sony line to various name-brand based fashion Barbie dolls, and it's hardly fascism.
If, contrary to Microsofts youth marketing methods, young people are introduced to interoperability and standards compliance in programming, it can yield a much more positive result.
===================
-
I have used both *nix and M$ products for several years and I'll take *nix any day. It has taken a while for *nix to get a full featured GUI which has been the main reason that it hasn't been accepted at the desktop level. If you don't think that is changing, than you are wearing blinders. Add WINE, a fully functional implementation of the Win32API that will run hundreds of M$ Windows programs and there is no excuse to put up with Windows. With the exception of OLE, I don't think M$ has done anything original in the last decade. IMHO they have done just the opposite and tried to stiffle innovation. There implementation of JAVA is an atrocity. Word was to compete with Word Perfect, Power Point vs. Harvard Graphics, Excel vs. Lotus 123, Access vs. DBase, etc..... There networking leaves a lot to be desired (although they have been able to catch up in the last couple of years). And what about the most successful unix project, the Internet (neither Bill nor Al Gore created it)? A group of Unix "xealots" working together to achieve a common set of communications protocols. As far as a formal education, I don't have one. I don't need a formal education to know the difference between quality and garbage.
windows: aiding idiocy since 1990.
FluX
After 16 years, MTV has finally completed its deevolution into the shiny things network
"It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once." -David Hume
I'm not a Windows supporter by any means but I've got to take exception to this...I've built several systems out of junk parts and I've only had 1 problem with windows (It was WinME..didn't like my Etherlink II card). The main problem I've had with Windows was IRQ hell and that's been pretty much ironed out with 2000.
Or is it evangelism? It is said that when Steve Jobs saw Apple ]['s in a classroom that he realized the great good that could be done with computers for children.
Apple and IBM both competed vigorously in the school space (oh no am I begining to think like a marketdroid shoot me now shoot shoot!), Pascal and BASIC.
This is an old game. Welcome to it!
-Todd
Yayy!! Long live the empire.
The real problem here is that the Microsoft tools are teaching kids C and C-derivative languages. C is a broken language, and has been since the beginning. It doesn't even have first-class functions! If you want to give a kid a good solid grounding in computer programming, please teach them a real programming language so that they will know better when they do eventually learn C or a C-derivative. Take Scheme, for instance: Scheme is very easy to learn, it is very powerful and elegant, and implementations such as DrScheme are portable as well (as well as having a decent IDE). As for people who balk at functional programming: Have you ever considered that using pipes to connect two programs in the Unix shell is analagous to using lazy evaluation to connect two functions in a functional programming language? The functions run concurrently and values are only returned from one function when the other function needs it. Maybe you should read up on it before passing judgement. Here is a paper (Yes, Scheme does not support lazy evaluation as a first-class construct, yet it has other advantages such as easy syntax and capability to program in other styles)
Those who do not know the past are doomed to reimplement it, poorly.
While this may seem like it makes sense, during the last year of my high school our school took a $70000 grant from a local teleco that was given to increase our (already quite formidable) computer science program. $6000 of it went to routers for us to play with, $64000 went to buying Windows NT Server edition for every computer in one of our labs. Schools are beurocracies, so they don't always (ever?) make common-sense decisions. Also note that they spent another $12000 of taxpayer's money for various methods to secure those boxes (but they still were around 1/10 as secure as the linux box at my house).
-ElendaleIANAT (I Am Not A Troll)
you mean it didn't work for apple and they went bankrupt a long time ago?
instead of a couple of C-like languages why not teach 'em C?
You can buy a commercial IDE cheap and get the same funcitonallity on Linux. I found a copy of Metrowerks CodeWarrior for linux in my university book store for $50. I suppose there is a volume discount for school systems too. This was reviewed on /. previously. So no, you don't have to type gcc $whatever every time.
[===>Mike
echo "$SOMETHINGWITTY"
vi is the bastard child of Satan. 'nuff said.
Then again, I actually LIKE Visual Studio, so many of you will discredit my opinion right off the bat.
Stop paying for the Windows OS.
-i
I got started on LOGO. Keep them away from basic, though. Perhaps starting them on Lego Mindstorm or would be a good idea. I'm not entirely sure of how that language is arranged, or how hard it would be for a 7 year old to grasp, but with some coaching I think it would be interesting. Just adding that physical aspect to it, to show him that his program is _doing_ something, and not just dancing on the screen would be a great booster. It would give him the chance to be more creative with less skill, I'm sure. How do those things do in the bathtub, anyways? I always did want my cruise boat to do more than just go in circles.
-i
Optimally, the school could employ someone to do this over the summer, after they were trained the previous school year on their own workstations. Gradual phase-in would take care of the time cost. Teachers, at least where I live, have been called in in previous times for an entire 4 day weekend to learn how to use new grading/attendance software.
/dev/null or similar.
As for students, they're students. They're supposed to learn. Getting used to a KDE desktop is not all that difficult a thing to comprehend. Most students understand directory/file structure, and pending my taking this for granted, it's not that hard to make the change from "My Computer" to "/". After all, unless they're taking Computer courses, they don't give a flying fish about
This is where all this leads to. The students who don't care about unix won't know the difference. They'll still know how to use an office suite like KOffice or StarOffice, and can bring these skills fairly easily to Excel or Word or Wordperfect or whathaveyou. Who knows, they might even figure out how to use a shell in their spare time, and realize it can be faster for doing the job.
The students who will get the most out of this are the ones who are currently doing no more than simple hardware research, playing with Legos and making HTML documents for the first time in their Comptech 3200 classes! This is the highest course my highschool offers, and the most difficult thing I've only heard about them learning is Quickbasic! This was never covered in my CompTech 3200 class last year, and these courses are standard throughout the school board. At least, bare minimum, with linux students could learn something quasi-useful, like creating a web page on a shell, and not in Netscape Composer. At least then they'd learn basic file operation. They can't do that with Windows, because giving them a dos-prompt is dangerous. Ass backwards, indeed.
The last time schools paid this much for an OS here was, I believe, in 1998. That's two years. A ten thousand every two years (estimating both clients and servers are upgraded for a 150 workstation network) on this scale could go employ a unix-clueful technology specialist in schools instead of an NT user.
Schools are going to be using computers now until we stop using communal school systems and begin to tutor students individually or in small groups. We're talking the forseeable future in savings. Schools would not have to buy another OS, ever. This initial migration will save more than it will cost in the long run. Savings which could go to better educating interested and talented students about computer science.
Don't even get me started about graphic design, the focus of more than one course, with the Gimp vs. Adobe Photoshop.... which the school can't afford.... MS Paint it is!
-i
(this may change when the KDE IDE is finished)
If you mean KDevelop, the 1.0 final was released in december last year.
For Example:
Open KDevelop
Create a C Terminal App
(Enter: nothing)
Then hit run.
Hey presto! It works. Wow. That looks real different to Unix programming, doesn't it?
Hey presto! It works. Wow. As you see its even more easy to get started.
I started learning basic myself (the book "Basic Basic" on my PCjr at age 13. Of course that screwed me for other languages later no. That's probably why I'm not a programmer, that and I don't want to be one.
Same thing happened to me. Same language, same platform. Hard to code when your natural inclination is to use goto statements. I think everything I wrote as a kid revolved around $INKEY statements. Wonder whatever happened to that BASICA cartridge...
--
Until *nixes become a lot more user friendly, they won't become prevalent in the lower reaches of education. Remember, the teachers need to know the subject matter intimately to teach it well. If they need to spend a long time getting to grips with the operating system and programming tools, they will not use them. They need something that can be integrated quickly into the general learning environment of a school with the minimum of training time (they can't take time off to do it, and they don't have the spare time to learn on their own)
So, make *nix nice and easy to learn, and more user friendly, then the educators will take notice.
Game dev and music blog
Don't you think that 'indoctrinating' is slightly on the strong side? Seems far too much like pandering to the anti-MS-ites round here to me. Why not at least consider the fact that it might actually have some worth? A quick glance at the employment listings will show you how many MS-tech developers are being hired these days.
Surely it makes sense for people to be equipped to take these jobs? If they don't want them, they can go do something else. Schools should be educating for the mainstream, the most widespread and accessible technologies, not relatively niche and special interest technologies. Of course, these other subjects should be mentioned, and pupils helped where possible to find out about and explore these alternatives. But then, a totally *nix-based educational system wouldn't prepare people for programming in an MS-dominated IT world, which would be just as bad.
Game dev and music blog
Many Schools and ISP's offer free shell accounts, also if you do a search for free shells on google.com you should find quite a few. Also get a copy of open BSD or linux. It's free, you just need a box to run it on. Maybe your parents would allow you to dual boot. Be sure you ask first if it's not your computer, and if you aren't sure exactly how to install it ask for help, there are Linux User Groups all over the place, I assume in the UK also, i'm sure you can find someone to help.
The only classes that aren't platform indepenent are the ones that really can't be. It's hard to be platform-indepent when teaching x86 assembly! Even in these cases there are labs available for people without computers or without the needed OS.
Bottom line is, most schools already go for platform-indepence. When you think about it, most languages are not OS-specific. Just the libraries and APIs - but that's not what should be taught. A good school teachs programming concepts which should really be not only platform-independent but to a greater degree language-independent. I have yet to go to a course which required you to be able to use a specific operating system. You do have a choice. It's currently Windows/UNIX, which all the Mac people absolutely hate with a vehemence that scares even Linux zealots, but it's a choice...
You are in a maze of twisty little relative jumps, all alike.
>own an Intel product
Don't you know that AMD also makes x86 CPUs (which are better, BTW)? How can I take an anti-Microsoft person who doesn't even think about AMD seriously?
You made one big mistake, and that means I won't even read the rest of your article. You are hypocrite.
the key question here is how are we going to fund such a programme?
I just haven't got the money to afford Visual Studio.... even at the academic rates (which of course aren't available to high school students.... only faculty or those in university/college) Linux is cheap (I picked up a boxed copy basically paying only a couple bucks in tax and a few stamps after the mail-in rebate.... haven't got a cd burner and am still on dialup).... And the people out there are a lot more helpful if only I could manage to get permissions for a linux box with which to play around on at school....
Nathan
If you don't have anything nice to say, say it often.
- Ed the Sock
Amen! I can't tell you how many problems I've had with the registry. Doing any sort of automation is a PAIN with M$ stuff because you have to code through strange API's (ie ADSI) in VBScript (OT: VB is _NOT_ a real language!). However, If I want to config BIND, or Apache, I just have a perl script dynamically build out a zone or conf file respectively. It's also a _LOT_ less resource intensive to rebuild a plaintext conf file then it is to build out a config using ADSI or the registry COM.
There is no longer anything that can be done with computers that is nontrivial and clearly legal. -- Paul Phillips
"Malfunction" is nothing more than propaganda and assorted bullcrap from M$? One does not learn from seeing things from a single point of view. That's brainwashing, and I'm sure everyone who goes through this has such a thing done to them.
Then again, we can't be hypocrites and only show them our particular angle alone.
So what are we to do? We must show both platforms, use of each, and show the ups and downs of each. If they make their own choice, then that's one less clone, whether for us or against.
Chris 'coldacid' Charabaruk Meldstar Entertainment
I am (sort of) working on one right now, based on the very interesting Programmer's Workbench from M$' old PDS packages. It's one of the few things from Redmond that I like (the other being QuickBasic, hehehe).
What I am hoping to have in my IDE is all the usual. Syntax coloring, notepad, project file that can be used to generate a makefile, etc. I am programming this in QuickBasic, and with the help of a QB to C converter that I am helping out with, will create happy portable C code for all to enjoy.
I know it sounds like blind idealism, but it is ideals that bring changes and new things. Anyways, PWB rocked!
Chris 'coldacid' Charabaruk Meldstar Entertainment
My school offers two programming classes; the first teaches BASIC, and the second teaches Visual Basic or C++ (using Visual C++).
Originally, the second class used 386s & Borland (whatever their product is called), but the year that I took the class they switched to Pentiums & Visual C++.
I already knew C++ and had experience with CodeWarrior and the various GNU tools, and I found that using Visual C++ was like re-learning the whole language all over again (it just sucked big time).
Now, I've heard that the classes use Mainfunction to do a weekly project, and they spend their time working only with Visual C++.
I recently started a Linux programming group (club) at school, and many of the kids who want to join learned C++ there at the school and I've had to turn away a lot of them because they can't use anything but Visual C++ (they have no idea what gcc is and can't seem to grasp that VC++ is a POS that only works with Winblows).
My concern is that Visual C++ is producing a whole new generation of ignorant Windows programmers, and I'm not aware of any high school in the area that actually uses GNU tools for programming...
Are you saying coconuts migrate?
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You should get outside of your cubicle a bit more.
Like most folks, I learned on the BASIC that came with my little "home computer". Remember when there was more than one or two kinds of home computer? Sure those little boxes were not much more than programmable game boxes, but they _were_ programmable. As a result, I learned the thrill of staying up coding all night very early in my career. Not to mention the skills you learn coding your magnum opus on 32k and no fixed disk. You get clever with joystick ports and cassette recorders.
The problem may be that there are *too* many choices. It can be bewildering for a web-savvy kid when starting to explore the options for learning to code on their own. All those books, and languages, and docs.
Also, I have to mention some of the programmable toys that are coming out. The best example is good old LEGO. The Mindstorms is an excellent introduction into basic coding concepts. It's all there: variables, event handling, looping, subroutines. The interface is perfect for the raw beginner, but once you reach a certain sophistication, you can graduate to whatever style of coding you like. Want to use VB? LEGO provides the SDK. Want to code in C or Forth like a real robot coder? You got it.
Heck, if you want to create your own firmware and port your own language to it, those tools are there, too, and all free.
Still, I can't help but be a little afraid that most kids will grow up thinking the web is the internet, the internet is a kind of TV, operating systems are windows and mouses, real computers are PCs and coding is Visual Basic.
-- clvrmnky
At my university, all the department does is set up one machine with the required setup of (at the moment Quad-boot) OSes and software for that year, image it, and toss the image onto the rest of the machines in that lab. REally not a difficult process.
As the author of ToonTalk, I'd like to clarify this a bit. ToonTalk is a descendant of Prolog (via Concurrent Prolog, Herbrand, and Janus). See the paper "From Prolog and Zelda to ToonTalk". But equally accurately one can describe ToonTalk as a concurrent object-oriented system. Teams of robots correspond to the methods of an object. They typically run concurrently (in different houses or on the back of pictures) and they communicate and synchronize by giving birds messages to deliver to their nests. While there is no notion of inheritance, delegation is straight-forward to program.
And despite the sophisticated underlying computation model, it is appropriate for 6 year olds (as well as adults). See for example the European Playground Project that has been helping 6 to 8 year olds build computer games in ToonTalk.
- ken kahn
Yes, darling, time to depreciate the intellectual capital of the firm again....what say we mark it down about a half billion? (hmmm, 10,000 programmers at say $50,000 a pop....add up fast, these little forced changes, don't they?)
int WINAPI WinMain() ;)", 0);
{
MessageBox(0, "What do you mean being indoctrinated by MS?
return 0;
}
I've used regedit. and I've gotta say there's a hell of a difference.
Most of the Unix config files are plain text and just shy of plain old english. Even using regedit, the windows registry is a pretty murky and cryptic place to be.
"If God created us in his own image, we have more than reciprocated"
(Ah, logo... that brings back memories.)
What about Pascal? Much like BASIC, it was originally designed as a teaching language, but it's more structured. I mean, I learned BASIC at about 7 (so it's possible), and only got to pascal when I started University, but the basics of the language (if you'll excuse the pun) are pretty straight-forward.
And it has a lot of similarities to C, so if the kid gets into programming, it's not such a big progression to "grown-up" programming languages.
(Just remember, no-one should have to use FORTRAN for anything. Ever. I had to, and I don't program anymore...)
"If God created us in his own image, we have more than reciprocated"
I will re-state a previous point of view - if I were up and coming, I'd want to learn on & in something that I coud use. The chances of a MS job far exceed all others - take a look at the job postings.
We are doing our children NO favors by trainging them on Macs MUCH LESS unix/linux/whatevernix.
The Game Guy
Oh, I agree the direction you are headed in is definitely important. I think I assumed this was an 'in general' computer class, and that may not have been the case.
The Game Guy
Yes, I will agree with that. Funny, actually, I recently had a discussion with a few coder buddies of mine - we came to the conclusion we'd be moving away from client server apps in favor of web based apps. Now, in our case, that means MS because we do Cold Fusion (and Delphi - hello Linux hopefully) - but of course it really doesn't matter to me as long as it works.
The Game Guy
Good idea. Let's teach them a language they have about a 2% chance of ever using again.
How about we teach them VB? The chance of using it in either a programming (ok, maybe not a _real_ programming) job or VBScript is VERY high. Python is going to be practically useless to 95% of kids. So is pascal (Well, I love Delphi - but I don't think it's much longer for this world) Your last paragraph amuses me - what you _really_ mean is that teaching them python is a way to get them into Unix before they find out that windows is easier to use. It wouldn't work anyway.
The Game Guy
Except that's not the real world of programming. What makes you think the OS is going to become irrelevant, just out of curiosity?
The Game Guy
-Java would be a good next step. Java would be good first step. I think it's silly to teach people a programming language that isn't in heavy use. -Second, Python will stay useful all your life. Sure, if you're unix person. But, again, despite with Slashdot clones think, unix isn't what _most_ people work in -Third, Python runs under Windows. In schools, Not the point -Of course, we could teach them nothing but VBScript under Windows, but this is Slashdot, where handing control of the future to Microsoft is considered a Bad Thing. Which is also why yours was moderated up and mine wasn't - I didn't slam MS (which, incidentally, I hate, but I can stand the hypocracy that goes on around here - I hate that more)
Honestly, I don't know why I bother posting. I will also venture that what is taught should very much depend on a)grade and b)where they are headed. By this I mean are we talking about a general purpose programming class or are we talking about those headed towards computer majors in college? General programming course? - sorry, it should be VB -that's just the way it is. It's more heavily used by non-programmers than any language out there. Most people have never heard of Python. Headed towards a computer degree in college? Java is probably the way to go.
The need for everyone to assume MS=Bad here is so amusing. Just goes to show that intelligence isn't required to surf the net or work in linux.
The Game Guy
Assertions are great. I personally litter my code with assertions (for invariantes, preconditions, postconditions, etc.), but it's no substitute for running through code with a debugger.
I don't care how good you are, if you write any quantity of code at all you should be stepping through it with a good debugger before checking it in. It's an excellent sanity check and also allows you to explore unlikely error conditions by tweaking values (or manually stepping into code via. 'Set Next Statement').
That was a coincide, coward, I been playing with the preferences in /.
--
Cronos II - A GNOME mail client.
The first time I ever read a programming book it was for the MS(ucks) OS, I think it was VB. Back in those days (mmmm, 1.5 years back?) I wasn't using Linux as my main OS, however, I realized that "language" sucks big time! So I, ofcourse, bought a C programming book for Linux, three days later no more vfat partitions were in my HD. So, as a conclution, what I want to say is that I already take a look at development in several plataforms (this is just an example, I review a lot more languages for Windows when I code a program a client ask me and I also know other programming languages for Linux (mmmmm, PERL, C++ (I rather prefer C), etc.)), and since I'm 16 years old you can say I'm a "kid". =P
--
Cronos II - A GNOME mail client.
I originally started programming in BASIC many years ago (possibly when I was 13, too). Today, I work with C++ at a large corporation, and as best as I can determine, I'm considered rather competent.
Admittedly, BASIC sucks, but it provides an okay start. Ultimately, what's really important isn't necessarily the language as much as the drive and desire to learn the fundamentals of programming.
For me, I found it fun to delve into some of the deeper, darker aspects of the system; I used to use the poke/peek statements to bit-twiddle, and I even took the time to learn a little Z-80 assembly so I could do scary neat tricks (this is in my mid-teens, mind you). By sheer experimentation, I eventually developed better techniques that were portable to other languages.
I could just as easily have started with PASCAL, batch files, LISP, ALGOL, PL1, Smalltalk or (god forbid) Perl. It doesn't matter... my own interest in programming drew me to learn whatever languages I wanted to learn.
If I had to do everything all over again, though, I would wish that I had Smalltalk available to me as a kid. Smalltalk is a relatively easy language to learn (in my humble opinion). It also (more importantly) provides a strong object-oriented environment that helps get you thinking about how objects work together. Too often, someone starts out with C or BASIC or some other procedural language, and then finds they have to go through some kind of 'paradigm shift' to adjust to a radically different way of programming with objects.
This 'shift' provided the greatest challange to me as a programmer. I had to learn how to get away from looking at things in terms of process, to see things in terms of interrelationships. Smalltalk makes this relatively easy to see because it's already a fairly robust system of objects communicating with each other.
And.. lucky you.. Smalltalk is freely available these days. You might try GNU Smalltalk..
Ultimately, though, if you simply listen to your child, and see if there's any interest in programming at all, the tike will take to it without much prompting.
And so it goes.
just as long as no well-meaning slashdot readers get in trouble for offering to "show kids their python"
were you expecting to see a sig here? perhaps you'd rather see the inside of an ambulance!
MSVS6 made things pretty damned easy in opinion:
*easy to compile a program
*absurdly easy to debug a program
*programming in the windows environment is actually better: turns out windows is a lot more particular about algorithm errors then *nix
As a start-off point, MSVS is a very friendly tool. Now that I am in college, I have started working at a lab porting a unix app to pc, and I can tell you having an entire IDE is a whole lot better than cross-referencing in emacs. My boss was impressed with the simplicity of MSVS, and this is a guy who knows how to program in Unix.
There are some problems with learning to program in MSVS:
*it's so simple, I don't even know how to make a Makefile, which makes moving to Unix harder
*you take debug for granted in MSVS
Whats the point? Well, for getting kids into programming, there is no question in my mind that MSVS is a great tool. It's on a Win pc, which means they will know how to get around, and the amount to which it aids in compiling a program is great. The downfall is being stuck on the simplicity and not being able to expand to a different programming environment. To this I say that any one that will every be truly good at programming, those who have the potential, will be able to make the shift when needed. But I tell ya, when ever I want to get a simple app going, I for one will always jump to a simple win32 command line app or program it on my TI-86 before I even think about creating folders and .c files and Makefiles.
Bottom line? MSVS is not evil, and it is a great tool for getting one's feet wet.
While we're on the subject, I knew how to program before I went to school, but I did not learn how to be a "good" programmer until I went to college. Your experience may differ.
But add to that also the `coolness factor' of GNU/BSD type OS vs MicroSoft. It is well documented that Linux rules the campus computer mentality if not the actual desktops. Once you are studying programming at college or university levels pretty much everywhere on this planet the peer pressure heavily favors unix. And these higher education facilities often are the grassroots of open source development.
So all in all I think MicroSoft is fighting a losing war vs open source / GNU / BSD.
I guess the real difference is in that ms type programming courses on intermediate levels are very practical in nature and are very application specific, while unix-type courses are still much more academical in nature although that is rapidly changing.
Of those to whom much is given, much is required.
if by "education-friendly" you mean really confusing and cryptic for a really long time, then yeah, unix is super education-friendly.
If you want your kids to have a *fun* computer for playing with, and a built in programming language and editor - get a Psion handheld. Little keys are easy for kids. There are many, many sites on programming for it, it's easy to learn OPL, and you can quickly make genuinely useful apps.
You can pick up a 3a for less than $100, with all the accessories. Most Linux distro's include connectivity software. And if you get tired of a Psion5 - you can install Linux on it!
- Derwen
http://fsfeurope.org/
Hope this helps
- Derwen
http://fsfeurope.org/
Not wishing to start a distro war, but if you were running Debian then
#apt-get update
#apt-get dist-upgrade
Would solve most of your problems. The other day most Debian woody users found Xfree86 being upgraded automatically from 3.6 to 4 on their boxes, all automagically. I just had to change one word in a config file to then get mine to work.
As I said, I don't want to start a distro war, but the package management tools *are* out there.
- Derwen
http://fsfeurope.org/
Why don't you check out the tutorials at javasoft.com?
The UNIX crowd caters to the bearded road-apples of our society. To like Linux, you either have to embrace its simplicity, modularity, or revolutionary stance. Unfortunately, most people don't want to fsck their hard drive every week or stumble around for a new kernel/GNOME update/Mozilla Milestone/KDE Kandidat/Samba release/et cetera every week. It's bad enough that computers are declared old after three months, but it's outright lunacy that an operating system is declared obsolete after one week.
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
Yeah, like KDE. I actually find KDE more useful than the windoze GUI.
You make the mistake of thinking you can educate the fundamental stupidity out of people. You can't.
Kids should be aware that there is more than Windows to computers. I think that the unices should be just as important if not more to children's computer education. It's pretty sad really, that real programming and Unix doesn't reach kids through the media very well (if it all). If they were given the oppertunity to learn this stuff at their age, they could have a bright and prosperous future. Not to say that would garantee it, but if they love it as much as I do...
They advertise adult-only products like Win2000 during Pokemon and Batman.
You won't see Linux putting some innane cartoon character or mascot on every product. No sirree!
Focus your hate in this direction.
Teaching kids to "use" computer to get other things done -- no tech interest -- put em on a Windows box. It's what they're going to have to use once they walk out the door. Teaching them about computers and how to learn for themselves (most important lesson you can give them) -- put them on a Linux box, FreeBSD, etc. Concepts and implementation both much clearer. Chance for creativity vis a vis system itself much better. Frustration much lower, as "how it works" is not deliberately hidden, obfuscated, or outright denied. Question: If someone gives you a black box and tells you it does cryptography, are you going to trust it at face value with important secrets? A bit obscure, but this is type of question kids in second group should be taught to ask and to answer for themselves. Cheers
Python is a very easy language to learn, and helped teach me the basics of Programming and the underlying principles of problem-solving. Mr. Elkner's program was very effective and I'd like to suggest it to any High School programming teachers here. Python also introduced me to the Open-Source movement, making me somewhat of a Linux/unix nut (I get so frustrated with the Windows Labs they make beginning programming students use). That's a good thing.
Anyway, that was just my two bits.
"It's kind of hard to go with the flow when it's bashing you against the rocks"
Let's hear it for AP Computer Science!
My High school offers APCS along with VB and that crap. We don't have the Mainfunction program or whatever that is, but apparently we still get a lot of MS crap.
Anyway, on to my point... Our APCS class uses a bunch of 386 sx/33s and a few 486s and pentiums networked on coaxial cable, running novell 4 and *gasp* win 3.1. We do all our programming in c++ in borland 4.5. On the other hand, our word processing/VB lab has a bunch of p200s or something networked on 10base-T and ethernet.
Even though we use win 3.1, we are a far cry from MS's goal as a Mainfunction school or whatever. Also, i think if the APCS class was taught on Visual C or something, then we'd all fail the AP test due to Microsoft's redefinition of C.
The primary manufacturer of tools I learnt to program with at college were by Borland. Borland were king of the hill in their day (in them dos days).
When I moved on to Uni they had a Unix mini, and I used GCC. By the time I left I noticed a larger number of PCs around than when I arrived.
This conversion of development tools has been an evolutionary one, rather than revolutionary. The best weapon in this particular war is to carry on as usual... to carry on using Linux.
-- Hob - Java Spectrum Emulator
You got exactly what was advertised and what you bargained for: a low-cost system running a particular version of Windows that will probably never be really happy running anything else. And there is probably a good reason why it was so cheap: Compaq systems are always a pain, even running Windows.
Next time, if you want a Linux system, go out and configure and buy something that's compatible. Unless, of course, you enjoy fiddling around with oddball hardware, but if you do, don't complain about it.
And if you want to redeem your current situation, go out and invest maybe $100 in a new modem, a new Ethernet card, and a new graphics card, and your system probably will still work OK. If it uses a USB keyboard, you probably also should be running RedHat 7.0 or some other more recent distribution.
The problem is that Compaq decides to do things differently with no apparent good reason. For example, on my desktop machine, there is no BIOS configuration screen. Instead, you are supposed to install a configuration system on the first partition of your hard disk. That thing turns out to be a Windows 3.1 derivative, complete with BSOD.
Relying on debuggers is a bad habit, and it is didactically bad for systems like Visual C++ to make it so easy. Very early on, beginning programmers may find program tracing educational, but programmers at such early stages shouldn't be using C++ to begin with.
What does Motif have to do with anything? wxWindows, FLTK, and Gnome certainly are easier to learn and use than MFC, and they are a lot better designed.
Have you even read the unix haters manual? X is terrible
The UNIX Hater's Handbook is many things, but it isn't a serious evaluation of technical merits.
languages like visual basic are alot easier to learn if your new to programming.
Easier than what? UNIX has a full complement of programming languages, including excellent beginner's languages, including Python, Logo, Scheme, and others. UNIX even had Basic long before VB existed.
ALso its now the year 2,000 and xwindows still does not support true type fonts. Incredible!
The X window system has supported scalable fonts since long before Windows did. And it has even supported TrueType fonts for a few years, although I don't see why support for a proprietary Apple/Microsoft standard is relevant to anything.
I am sick of looking up archane commands in text files. I am sick of poorly docuemented api's. I am sick of shell scripting.
Well, Windows won't save you from any of those if you try to do any significant work on it.
Microsoft's drive into schools is to hook end users who may also program. Scientists who need to do some calculations, business people who will be writing some VB add-ons for spreadsheets, etc. Microsoft doesn't care about the hardcore programmers because they know that those ultimately will have to program in whatever environment end users demand their software to run on.
Realistically, these users are going to face Microsoft software eventually, and they won't have the interest to learn a lot of new stuff. But the best thing from the perspective of the users is probably still to learn programming based on well-designed, non-proprietary tools like Python. That way, they learn skills that help them on Windows right away without being dragged irretrievably into the Microsoft marketing maul.
Of course, what is irritating about the whole process is that Microsoft can probably get tax write-offs for all those "educational contributions". We should really ask ourselves whether contributions like those shouldn't be written off at the incremental cost of producing an extra unit, which would be close to $0 for software.
Well I started off doing Q-Basic at the age of 13 on a Apple IIe in Middle school. My mom got me a 386 and I had MS-DOS I still did Q-Basic, but after a while I started doing C. I didn't think about a good GUI I just wanted to program. Today I'm 19 now using Authorware 5, Director 8, and Flash 5 at work. I figure I learned stuff like that pretty damn fast because I learn the back end(if-else,while and etc.) stuff before I learn all this crazy VB junk that people use today. Yeah I worked with VB for 3 months and it is a great and easy to use program.
It's just not fun see the same E-mail client, Start Menu and the same Media Player and the same Windows OS but just with something slapped at the end like Windows 9x, Windows NT, Windows 2K and Windows ME. When I was little I didn't of anything else besides MS. I used MS-DOS(I love them days!) Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows NT and Windows 2K. I didn't know or learn of Linux into a year ago, now I have RedHat 7.0 right Beside my Windows 2K boot. I use Windows 2K if I have to take work home or Beta test something for the company(and it doesn't crash). I love using Linux and into this day it's been my Favorite OS. I think it suck that I was blind for all them years without knowing about Linux or any *nix. Being able to program for a OS that people use not because they don't want to use MS stuff but for the fact that they can program for free have thousands of users look over there code and continue building on to it if you don't feel like working on it no more. The Linux community is a loving community at heart. When ever I was installing something new or having a hard time with something they were their.
I figure people must know what they are using and there is something better. Oh and GUI it's not hard to use, I figure if someone start from the ground on up just using something like KDE or Gnome that they wouldn't have a hard time and they would have some cool themes to go along with it. I heard from some people that they are sick of M$ and they wish that they could use something diffirent. They just can't because most of their Apps are MS only and they don't have the money for a Mac.
P.S: You will always have the people that care about M$, them iMacs lovers and them die hard Linux programmers. So why fight on
From Zero to Hero... Starbuck Zero
DemoLinux? Kinda like the BeOS 4.5 demo I saw at work. It was cool booting an OS off a CD like that. I would like to some more info in this so called DemoLinux if you would send me a URL at efeiling@tampabay.rr.com with some info I would love to look into it.
From Zero to Hero... Starbuck Zero
Ha ha ha!!! Some people go to school to program because they want to make money in that field. Most of them that study and programmed at home do it because it's just plain fun. Having to take my time I learn alot. Put it this way the company that I code for now, it's programming but no feeling go into that code. It's done how they want it, none of my ideas at all, just plain and simple. When I do something at home it's diffirent I can take my time, no deadlines, no people bitchin' saying "This doesn't work! Or you didn't add this!"... Being a programmer at the age of 19 I know that shit suck for a fact. I wouldn't pay $20 to listen to your ass! Because I gave up weekends to program something I didn't care about! But it had to be done, I couldn't even go out to the movies or nothing...
From Zero to Hero... Starbuck Zero
I have to disagree with several of your points here. First off, you state 'buying a reliable whitebox will cost as much as a name brand'. Sometimes, yes, this holds true. But there is the fact that alot of 'name brand' systems use cheap hardware to keep costs down, as they are targeted at people who wouldn't know the difference anyway. So who says how reliable a name brand system is? Also, whitebox systems are usually considerably cheaper if you know how to shop for them, or better yet, build your own. Plus you are more or less guaranteed a higher level of PC compatability compared to such companies as Compaq. Plus, if your intenetion is to put a free OS onto this system, that compatability WILL help, and it will keep costs down. There is no way an off the shelf system is goin to compete pricewise with a properly purchased system witha freeOS. Aside from that, a *nix based evironment is far more open about what it is doing under the hood than a windows environment, along with being less obtuse about it. It is a known fact that M$ does not like disclosing how it all works, sure they have the published information but there is far more detail to the inner workings of Windows than those books disclose. Also, if you are trying to teach kids the inner workings of computers, an OS that is up front about it will be a better learning tool. Windows is not up front about it in any way. Oh, someone already stated this, but running a year 2000 version OS on a 1997 system will obviously support all the hardware, thought a 1997 version of linux will not, nor a 2000 version on a 2000 box. Actually, I take that last back, if you had built or ordered a box with the intention of running a *nix OS on it, you would have made sure you bought one that is totally standards compliant and ran on supported hardware. Just randomly buying a box, much less a Compaq, does not cut it for alternative OSs. As for your qualms with the TEST kernel, no matter what anyone says, it is still a TEST kernel. If something doesn't work, well, don't be surprised. You want stability? Run a stable kernel. Simple logic here. Now, I wonder, how did you try to install all of those OSs on your new system. Did you merely pop the CD in and go? I ask because, at least with OpenBSD, they inform you in the documentation that the generic install kernel won't work on all systems. You may need to tweek to get to the install, especially with not quite PC compliant hardware. I would imagine the same holds true for FreeBSD. As far as your Hercules card is concerned, if you want to utilize it, install X4.1, it's not a difficult process, and they even have a binary installation if compiling the whole thing is too much for you. So, the point? Stop whining that the free OSs aren't up to par when the problem is not the OS, it's poor prior planning.
System possessed? # grep deamon
I am 15... As far as I recall, I saw my first snippet of code at 9. It was done in qBasic, and was a screen saver that made random dots on the screen until it was full. Now I know that it was extremely messy code, which was why I couldn't decipher it. My parents bought me a qBasic book at 10, and I was making programs in no time. I kept at it, until I discovered Visual Basic around 12, and just last year I started working with my first non-microsoft language, Delphi... but still for the windows platform. It was about the same time that I discovered the Unix platform, and I still can't really program for it because I have to teach myself... I have taught myself 90% of what I know about computers, and its really a frigging pain. I mean, with all the computer courses in my school, only ONE covers C++, and even thats only for about the last 1/4 of the year. Now I'm looking at the new curriculum for years that come after me (im in Ontario, fellow ontarionians will know what I mean) and I gag. Grade 9: VB, Grade 10: Delphi, Grade 11: Delphi/C++. Not to mention the teachers dont know a thing and if you code based on their suggestions for "clean code" you will be lynched by any open source community in the world. I've found a couple online resources for teen programmers, but they are terrible. Webmonkey is great for web-programming, but nothing for app programming. I've lately been doing a website for my company, its an article site, slightly similar to Slashdot, based around the "typical teenage guy" topics: music, cars, movies, sports, dating. Im thinking I will take my engine and set up a resource for teen programmers. But before I can convince my colleauges to agree to this project, I need to see some support. If you would be interested in, and USE such a site, send an e-mail to me at intervention@home.com
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You can't fight in here! This is the war room!
What about if we congratulate them on taking the initiative to educate our children? Is there anything that Microsoft will ever do that will not get picked, criticized and bashed by the /.ers ?
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... and getting back to practical versus theoretical: yes, logic programming has great benefits. So does functional programming. But the world is procedural, and object-oriented if you're lucky. And that's just the way it is.
The question is ... why aren't there more Naz ... I mean Mac users? :-)
How do you know she is a girl? ;-)
Anyway, I too am 15, frequently use Linux (Though,I prefer to use windows to surf the web and play games, but use Linux for Word processing, and to experiment with such stuff as Win4Lin, Vmware, or Wine)
I would like to try to start to learn Java, but I can't get a disant book for less that 40$ (and I'm broke) so I'm going to wait and beg my mom for one for christmas. I have an Uncle who knows Java, but the time I asked him for help, he just glanced at the book, and then told me I wasn't really trying and that it was all right there in the book. (which was untrue the book was made for people who had priar experience in c++ or perl, but was the only one the library had)
1.) In this discussion there seems to exist a tendency to believe Unix == OSS. I've spent well over a decade working in and on various *nixes without ever doing OSS work. The two are far from synonymous.
2.) To take up your question - My experience is that there's probably more coding jobs available in the Windows world, which, this being a market-driven economy, means that rates for Windows coding may well be lower than that for *nix programming. The highest paid hourly coders I know are those working in Smalltalk - An OO language that doesn't appear on most people's resumes. It's the relative rarety of good Smalltalk people that brings in the big bucks. (When you can find a job, that is. ;-)
3.) As for the original post in this thread, if you've never encountered either *nix or Windows as a programming environment, the concept of "easier" or "more fun" is hard to define if there's no other alternative to whatever gets put in front of you first.
"The plural of anecdote is not data" -- Bruce Schneier
And it's used in those situations where other development environments fail to manage complexity.
Alan Kay ('I invented the term Object Oriented') gives a nice demonstration of Squeak Smalltalk from a child's perspective in his famous talk The Computer Revolution Hasn't Happened Yet; spool forward to minute 48 for the Squeak demo.
For Smalltalk info start browsing at www.smalltalk.org.
Besides, in the long run with the budgets of schools as tight as they are, they are sure to look at free open source software to meet there computerization needs.
Also, the true nerd will be attracted to the system he can fool around with more and make his own additions to. And what better for that than LINUX and other open source systems. So, I think in the long run this Microsoft program is going to help the industry as a whole and not just MS.
S
When I first started learing about computers, I started programming in Windows. I learned a lot of low-level Win32 API calls and I can make an entire simple application from scratch with only minimal trips to the documentation. Despite all that, when I decided to give Linux a try I was quickly hooked. Being able to compare the way Linux does things to the way Windows does things, I can tell you for certain that Linux/Unix is easier to program in than Windows. If that isn't "natural appeal" for programmers, then I don't know what is. Bugs caused by closed drivers? Maybe for some people.
Aaron Plattner
I love this shit! People accusing or making the assumption that MS is trying to destroy a movement by affecting future programmers. Think about this...
Here is a billion-dollar computer company that got its popular start by making a word processing program called Word for the Apple Mac OS. Now they have an operating system that runs on about 80 percent of all PC home computers. Children are going to use it and eventually get hooked. Maybe develope an interest and perhaps want to start a career in computers. Whether it be as an IT professional or as an administrator or as a gaming developer.
Doesn't matter. Microsoft is protecting there best interest by grabbing these future programmers. Teaching them the tools with the Windows OS. What is wrong with that? If you were president of a multi-billion dollar computer company, wouldn't you do the same? In this example fuck the idea of Open Source. If you had a closed source widely popular OS and needed to keep it alive for fear of losing the power to someone else, wouldn't you do whatever it takes to make sure people stayed with your OS? Of course you would! You can't deny that!
This isn't about indoctrination... it is about the Open Source/Linux Lovers fear of not populating ever computer and destroying such a giant. Because it all comes back to programmers. They make the world of computers go 'round. (Along with hardware developers and yadda yadda yadda)
If the Open Source community fears this. Then fix it! Make somthing simialr. GNOME has already started with a Linux version of VB.
What we have to realize is that MS is always going to be a constant in the computer world. Whether it be as an OS giant or an App Giant. We should just embrace, deal with it and maybe try to do better.
~AdmrlNxn
~Admrlnxn
"I got your mom in my trunk"
i agree with you completely. I first learned to program with good old qbasic..creating nifty graphics with the crude drawing functions taught me how to use loops and function calls. Then I got a copy of VB 3.0, and started learning that. VB is excellent because it's an instant gratification language, easy to use, AND it does have real world use. Perfect for teaching young programmers not entirely too sure about themselves (ever hear that "where will i ever need this?"). From VB i moved on to c, java, lisp..now majoring in CS at UT-austin. And it has all to do with those "toy" microsoft languages.
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From personal experience I can tell you that learning on a to program on a Microsoft platform has no really hurt my ability to program for Unix. In fact the very first programming language I was learned MS VBasic, and since I started to code with C, and Java I've never looked back. As soon as I started to use unix on a shell account ive been awestruck by its ease as a programming language.
Unix is an OS built to work so well with C. In windows doing file/printer I/O was really fucking annoying and quite cryptic for a beginer, in unix it was just SO simple to understand conceptually and implement. Sockets as well are beyond annoying in windows and in Unix are just so much easier to do (and do right).
Having the Source code to all of the important system binaries made learning C so much easier for me as in gave me more example code than I could possibly dream of and having header files to do most use most of the operating systems functions(eg unistd.h) allowed my programs to actually do useful things (as opposed to a database or snake in VB).
I say let Microsoft educate the kinds, because as soon as they get thier hands on Unix theyll never want to go back. If you want to get kinds using unix then the best thing you can do is make them see how much more powerful it is. theres not a dreary Windows using day that goes by where i dont wish for a nice combo of cat and grep or ps and kill to make this piece of crap OS do what i want it to. Hopefully i can now get back to using my good windows friends Scandisk and defragment to finish cleaning up my harddrive so i can split it into a linux partition for the first time since last June.
As a kid with personal experience there is NOTHING better than unix for the aspiring programmer.
Oh Well, Whatever, Nevermind...
don't fight with problem, but understand the its roots. nothing happens, because it just happens. there are many programming tools for unix that work very well for advanced users, but let's face it - are quite hard to get started with. MS has all tools fine and nice for starting users(visual clickclickclick etc), kilometers of text for newbies, which are useless for advanced users(have tried to find something from MSDN? yeah, i know that feeling of wanting to hit somebody who created that overbloated mess). what we can do to help to promote unix is not to make tens VC++/VB for unix like thingies, but make somehow all existing tools somehow more "eatable" for newcomers. just my 2 cents.
1. To be a programmer one must first learn the basic use of computer systems. This task is far and away better accomplished by learning on an enviornment provided by iether Apple or MS. The user interface is much more intuitive and, I'm sorry to say, much closer to the future of computer than a *nix/DOS prompt. 2. Not everyone has natural programming talent. Some are far better than others. The damand for the skill far outstrips the supply. In order to increase the supply, thus helping to further improve techknology (Not my spelling), there is a need for systems and enviornments that don't scare off the average person from learning how to use the tools. This is was MS excells at. And that is why most software shops use MS VS. BC it is easier to learn and more work is accomplished from a higher level of abstraction. 3. For a long time people beleived that machines could never compile assembly code that was as efficient and usefull as humans could. Noone ever thought that compiled languages would take off. People would be kidding themselves again to think that there won't soon be another revolution that allows programming to iether be done visually or through the spoken word. Thus making learning all details of a *nix system irrelevant. That's my 3 cents and I'm sticking to it.
The issue is:
Are we telling people about software as speech (de-CSS in English, requires login), or about Open Source as FREE Software.
Recently I handled some people, people who barely knew about computers and internet, social sciences people, "The Cathedral and The Bazaar". The results were amazing. They caught the story completely and now we are discussing the issues with a new light.
My moral would be: tell teachers and parents about the new social values of Cooperative Development and sharing versus cheating, and the battle will be won, no matter if they use Windows. Tell teacher to start cooperative projects, OSS like, using the Internet as a collaborative tool. They will find it a great idea once they catch the concepts (and it's difficult for them to understand the issues). The boys will learn to use the mail to speak, no matter if they use Exchange or even Outlook for that.
That should be our target. When they know about Free Software and how it develops and evolves, they will compare it with propietary solutions, and they will have a clear mind to understand the differences.
Sorry for the evangelic tone, but I feeled truly evangelic ;)
Yes I believe we should. The reach of the *nix community is huge and as a 'grass roots' "organisation" is capable of making a significant impact. Whether one sees this as a political movement or a religion is irrelevant IMHO. This is about educating people to think and to question rather than simply accept (in this case Microsoft's largesse in giving away access to their proprietary software tools). However because of the'ragged' nature of our "organisation" it's unlikely to have the discipline to achieve much of an impact without having imposed some form of strategic plan and that dear friends is about as likely as Microsoft OS being released under a GNU public licence. I'd be happy to be proven wrong on this so feel free to set the record straight! :-)
The edge unix has is that it takes a lot less time and effort to expose the "bare metal" using text interfaces and config files. Even with these config files, contemporary Unix is almost as abstract as Windows.
To wit, I find installing drivers, running software, and programming in Unix to be a lot easier than it was to get around an old Atari 800. Things are a lot less "bare metal" in Unix. So, the idea that Unix is "really the nuts and bolts" is mostly an illusion.
I think this "fear/loathing of GUI" has really hurt mainstream Unix development. What's really ironic is that a lot of user interface experiments have been done in Unix, and many contemporary GUI features have been developed in Unix.
I think the registry is laid out in a very easy to navigate manner. Not having to search for config files is also very convenient.
Statements like that are setting off the bullshit detector from this 6 year WinNT system admin vet.
First of all, the search mech of RegEdit.exe is very slow and doesn't provide very much functionality at all (no regex's, no complex searches, no search indexing). Second, RegEdit.exe isn't even the approved editing tool, so you need to make your changes in RegEdt32.exe (which is also the only place you can see/set ACLs).
But the major problem with the Registry is that 90% of the stuff in there is not supposed to be user-editable (which means that it isn't documented), while 10% of the stuff is. That means that you for every interesting key, you've got 9 other keys full of binary junk or non-human readable settings. This 90/10 situation is the product of a horrid design decision to begin with -- either make it a closed box, or give me complete documentation.
Furthermore, lumping critical OS configuration such as hardware detection bits and partition maps in with 10,000 media player MIME types in with everyone's desktop background colors in with an buttload of path settings in a giant mystery database is just a bad idea on the face of it. Putting on a POS filesystem like FAT makes it a recipie for disaster.
Which is not to say that I'm a fan of UNIX config files. That system has it's props, but the basic incompatibities in syntax and scatter shot nature of those things just stinks of 20 year old ducktape. It will also prevent anyone from ever building a user-friendly GUI for system configuration (not a bug, mind you, but a "feature" for insecure unix admins in that it prevents them from being replaced by someone cheaper, but at the cost of keeping unix off the desktop). Anyone who has seriously tried building a unix admin gui (IBM AIX, NeXT/OSX), has dumped the text files in favor of a database, and they have done so without totally breaking commandline admin.
The world needs a sane structured config storage system, and it sure ain't the registry.
Ok. How are both setting up complex macros in emacs and learning cryptic commands easier?
What I don't understand is people who claim that programming under Windows is easier. It just plain isn't true.
Oh really. How is learning motif easier then the mfc classes? Have you even read the unix haters manual? X is terrible and languages like visual basic are alot easier to learn if your new to programming. ALso its now the year 2,000 and xwindows still does not support true type fonts. Incredible!
The environment is so unstable and unpredictable that you need a vast array of "test machines" ready to take a clean image so you can figure out if the problem is your program or the underlying (supposedly abstract) operating system. The tools are so feeble (or so localized) that they are virtually useless for any generalized task. I could go on.
Have you seen windows2000? It is the most stable Micrsoft product ever invented since os/2. :-)
I admit windows98 sucks goatballs but ms had to have a dos backbone for compatibility with old apps. Its not their fault. Try to compare w2k to linux instead since w2k is desgined to be cutting edge and stable. Also Motif and the nasty news/x windows crap is terrible to get anything done with it. A well respecting computer scientist said programming in motif is like building a bookshelf out of mashed potatoes.
Suffice it to say that I got a CS degree in the early 90's from a school that was smart enough to have a lab full of Sparcs. After school I did Windows programming and, having forgotten the "it just works" atmosphere of school, thought that unexplained crashes and hourly reboots were just par for the course.
Comparing windows 3.0 and the early releases of com and ole to today's technogolies is not a fair one. Today dcom/com is far supperior and easier to use then cobra. Also windows is now stable. I now NT 4 had a few rough spots mainly due to bad hardware and drivers but for desktops its very stable. I love going for months without rebooting my computer. Schools taught their programming in unix back in the early 90's not because unix was more powerfull per say but because 286 and 386 pc's were slow as hell compared to a mimi like the sparc station. It just happens to be that mini's mainly came with unix.
Now I've been programming on Linux exclusively for a full year and it's been heaven. Months go by before I boot my desktop...the servers rarely if ever get rebooted. The "API" is stable, simple and well-documented. It's easy! Untill you have to install a rpm package that conflicts with 80 other programs making it impossible to upgrade.
Try upgrading to kde2 by rpms. haha Hell is too kind of a word to describe it. I could only download the sources and compile it because linux has no standard installation api's and is years behind windows and mac.
As you can tell I had enough of unix. I have been a linux user for close to 2 years now but my main gripe is that I always have to upgrade every few months with new kde updates and gnome updates and each and every time I F*ck my system in the process. Sure you can use rpm -Uvh --force --nodeps but in return you can screw up your whole system just to updrage 1 or 2 packages! Unix is terrible in alot fo ways. One of freebsd's main developers wrote a huge portion of the 1.1 Linux kernel and he switched because of poor package managment. He said it was a nightmare trying to upgrade anything under linux.
I am sick of looking up archane commands in text files. I am sick of poorly docuemented api's. I am sick of shell scripting.
WIndows is far more easier to use. Unix is very stable and I give credit to the unix gods for that. I believe for myself its time to put linux back int he computer room where its strenght is and put windows back on my computer.
Kde2 was real eye opener for me. I relised after 3 F*CKING WEEKS TRYING TO GET KDE2 INSTALLED that perhaps Linux is not all its cracked up to be at its current maturity level. Sorry but I do not think teaching hs kids unix is a wise thing. It will turn them off programming in seconds.
As far as just plain solving problems, I can't beat REALbasic. I've done things like write 'AIFF unclippers' in a couple of hours, just puzzling out the format and writing an app to turn all the 'clip' values into 'clip-1' values to make a file safe for digital glass mastering. There is a lot of stuff that can be very easily built on a RB foundation.
However! There is no way to translate this ease and ability to do RAD work to deeper levels of programming. I can tell you that it sure doesn't translate to C programming, or Codewarrior, or GCC: the most basic concepts might be the same, there might even be parallels to things like pointer math ('memoryblocks') but the whole approach to RB is not the approach to more low-level languages such as were used to make RB itself, to make its nice sophisticated bugfree 'objects'. It's possible this is just a matter of degree, but the more you program in RB (or Visual Basic, or some such veryhighlevel language- possibly even MSVS depending on just how drag and drop it really is) the less capable you are of popping the hood and building your own engines, something that is almost obligatory with lowlevel languages.
I concede that most people cannot deal on this low level, but I'm also saying that these very easy candy languages _make_ people unable to deal on the low level. It's almost like a judgement call, a decision you have to make- do you go for getting lots of tasks done, or do you learn to actually program? Using the highlevel stuff can be great if you frequently run into a problem that must have a programming solution and cannot find or buy one, but the problems had better be 'amateur' problems. No matter how exciting your vision you're not going to program Quake in RB- in fact if you're very highlevel you might be entirely unable to cope with the Quake source even if you licensed it. Yet if you go totally lowlevel you might not see the actual problems because you're totally caught up in implementation. It's quite a puzzle.
We do need high level languages. I'm just concerned that this is not only indoctrinating people with particular habits and expectations (i.e. MS for everything), it is also taking a toll of people who might otherwise be able to do creative and productive work at the low levels- which are never going to go away. There is always going to be need for them, and I'd just as soon not have all the people in the world who can hack low level code paid to sit on their hands at Redmond- or debug VB :P
I work for MontaVista Software. Every line I write gets released under an open license. I'm better paid than every job prior (except for a few short-term contracts).
30 of the rest of the folks in my team do the same thing. Our primary competitor, Lineo, also employs a number of open source developers.
If you think there's no money to be made in open software, it's because you don't know where to work.
Not data, COMMENTS.
So I want to attach a comment to a value, describing why I set it to what it is.
Or I want to use version control (like RCS) on it to track all its previous values, how it's been changed, by whom, why and when.
These things are trivial with textual configuration files. They're not so trivial with regedit.
It's too hard to program computers these days. If I wanted to teach someone to program ten years ago, a machine like a BBC Micro would be great: you turn it on, it's immediately ready to accept a program, and drawing to the screen is relatively easy. If you want to draw anything now (essential for the gratification factor in learning to program) you have to become expert on events and windowing systems.
I'd like someone to put together a nice enviroment for beginning programmers. Base it on Python and gtk, so it's portable between Windows and Unix. Use Glade so people can start off drawing what they want their program to look like, then write bits of Python to make it work. Throw in a really good canvas widget, so it's easy to start drawing things and get things moving on the screen without worrying about expose events and redraws. Then write the book "Learn to program with Python", that takes beginners who've only ever used computers before by the hand and leads them through the delights of making them do your bidding.
I know that the CP4E project is looking to shape Python into the ideal beginners language. I'd love to see this happen, because Python is a beginners language you can stick with to write real, large scale applications that do real work.
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Xenu loves you!
First, your first language doesn't have to be one you'll use again. You'll find it easier to learn other languages once you've got a grasp of programming. Java would be a good next step.
Second, Python will stay useful all your life. Python is basically useful the same way Perl is, but it scales better for large programs. It's not for people who want to be programmers - it's for everyone. It's useful for that tiny little script to automate the thing you can't quite do by hand.
Third, Python runs under Windows. In schools, this is probably the environment I'd use to teach it.
Of course, we could teach them nothing but VBScript under Windows, but this is Slashdot, where handing control of the future to Microsoft is considered a Bad Thing.
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Xenu loves you!
The documentation for programming the OS is generally available with the OS (man 3), not as a developers kit; source code for tools is widely distributed, even for proprietary versions; nearly all versions of Unix include a C compiler; programming is ubiquitous -- most serious programming-minded Unix users will quickly be creating short shell or perl scripts, utilizing the entire traditional Unix environment in their programming. You can recreate a number of these things in other OSes, but with Unix they are assumed, ubiquitous, and part of the culture. There is a low barrier to entry.
Windows is not like this. Mac is not like this. BeOS, etc... well, beats me. And while you can get the Cygnus tools for Windows, and turn your Windows OS into a mini version of Unix... what would that prove?
That said, if you can't remember the name of all the bizzarely abreviated programs, and the slightly inconsistent option letters, that's another issue. I think MacOS X may have some good ideas of general cleanup (redoing the filesystem layout, etc) which could probably be expanded upon.
Still, for all its problems, Unix is still the best game in town for the programming-minded.
Let me guess, you wish the Lisp machines have taken over. For some people, Unix *is* natural, and for a lot more people, AI Languages are very non-intuitive. Unix was natural for me, and I like it quite a bit. I wish someone had introduced me to it sooner. I have nothing against AI Languages either, (well, Lisp is pretty ugly; I like Scheme a lot better) but I haven't been able to get any real work done in them yet--it makes common system programming tasks pretty clumsy.
I used DOS for a long time, and although I liked it a lot, it was missing some functionality that I wanted. I wrote a few commands of my own, basically re-implementing stuff like "which", "df", "touch", and "ls -R"... before I ever knew about Unix! Therefore, when I found all it had to offer, I was thrilled.
If you think Unix is bad with the "worse-is-better" philosophy, then you of all people should understand why we'd prefer Unix over Windows. The MIT Approach is to the New Jersey approach as the New Jersey Approach is to the Redmond approach. Also, Lisp machines are dead, Unix is alive and kicking, and Windows is dominant. Given the choice between Windows and Unix, I'd rather have Unix.
As there is no free version of Windows, and there are free versions of Unix, I'd say that Unix itself is quite a bit less proprietary and commercial than Windows. Is the Windows source open yet? No. What about Unix? Not only are there many implementations of Unix out there with source code available, (including Solaris, by the way) but you can even buy a book, and read about the original source and its design, with comments, as a teaching tool!
It's a good, simple, straightforward design, and I'm glad people are starting to realize that. All the major players in the OS market today owe a lot to Unix. Apple and Microsoft both sold Unix distributions at one point in time or another, and many of the new features that Microsoft has added to Windows were already in Unix in some form or another; that's innovation for you...
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Find a business that leases linux boxes and support, and they could do it, but I don't know of anyone out there yet
Go to google, search on "Linux workstation lease" and you will find some. Also try "linux PC lease". It's true that there aren't as many as for Windows, but they do exist. Many local companies would probably be willing to come up with an offer. I know that (shameless plug ahead) Linux Labs Would be willing to come up with a good offer.
Yeah. Go back to the stone age, and only use the kernels that the over-cautious kernel apologists are prepared to call a "release". Lose some functionality, but earn the right to complain when it doesn't work! (Sadly, a right you'll still need to exercise.)
So, obviously, you must run the nightly snapshot of Windows from the internal MS CVS (or equivilant). What? You can't get that? You must be back in the stone age too. I'm sure that MS, being the upstanding company that it is will also offer you unlimited tech support for the alpha versions of it's products.
once they've seen the best, they will never want to deal with a lesser environment.
Agreed, having seen vi, make, and gcc I NEVER want VC++ to darken my desktop again.
>>It's a good, simple, straightforward design. Please, explain that. I look at it in a different way, I think it is full of out-moded principles, out-dated paradigms, needless cruft hidden behind pointlessly cryptic filenames leading to executables which make up their own conventions as they go. And don't get me started on the idiocy that is symlinking.
I'll have a go.
Out-moded prinicples and out-dated paradigms: you mean like "everything is a file" and "read from stdin, spew to stdout" ? I'm sorry, but if you're stupid enough to think that these are bad ideas then perhaps you deserve to code the Win32 API and all the half-implemented and dependent-on-bugs interactions that come with Windows. I'll take my simplicity any day.
needless cruft hidden behind pointlessly cryptic filenames: You didn't provide any examples but I assume your gripe is because you are unfamilliar with the system. Someone unfamilliar with Windows would have a hard time trying to figure out what programs such as protman.exe, dosrep.exe, grpconv.exe, pidset.exe, asd.exe, mm2ent.exe, rg2catdb.exe and a host of others do. Sure I can guess at their function but unlike Unix, Windows doesn't have a help system which explains any of this. Windows does have extensive help on explaining what the fucking paperclip is for though.
executables which make up their own conventions as they go: I'm not quite sure I follow. Almost all of the "pointlessly cryptic" executables follow POSIX standards for their command line options, including --version and --help which is more than I can say for any of the afforementioned .exe's Windows has. And the executables which don't follow POSIX usually have decent man pages.
the idiocy that is symlinking: oh, let's not go there, what with the powerful SHORTCUTS that Windows provides... Symlinks are one of the best features I've run across in my experience of working with the various Unix filesystems. Stringing together a few commands, I can instantly tell whether the links are good or bad, what they point to, etc. I guess such features aren't useful in your line of work.
Times change, but not that much... I would have to suspect that there is still some urge to learn programming because of interest in games. And I definitely know that net projects are *still* one of the best ways to pick up new technology.
If this is in fact the case, then one of the best ways to promote education of free programming could be encouraging young folks to work on the various free game development projects out there. Fringe benefit: One day maybe getting more free, open source games that YOU can play. ;-)
And I'm not just spouting opinion here... I myself devote time to one of these game projects (www.worldforge.org), helping people learn about game programming, and I'm also participating in a project to author and promote free, open source textbooks (freebooks.myip.org).
If you have a few hours each week you can devote to helping one of these projects by helping teach or review people's code (or art!) and give good feedback, that would certainly be one of the best ways you can encourage learning of open tech. And if you need to learn some of this stuff your self and can afford a bit more time, well sheesh, do yourself a favor! ;-) And
in any case, participating in free communities is
a lot of fun, and can be very rewarding
personally. And of course it is the Right Thing
To Do. :-)
This assumes, of course, that the school will sit on their current version of Windows forever. However, anyone that knows anything about Windows realizes that every couple of years Microsoft is going to literally force a migration to the "next best thing."
In fact, that's part of the reason why companies are holding back on Windows 2000, it's going to cost them billions of dollars to upgrade their licenses, retrain their staff, and migrate from their existing systems. When these ongoing tasks are added to Windows' TCO, the balance shifts even more in Linux's favor.
This is one area where Linux has some serious TCO advantages. Not only is it less expensive than Windows, but upgrades are free. Oh, and development tools are free as well. And the Linux community is much less interested in making your skills obsolete. How useful are your old DOS skills, or the tricks you learned for Windows 3.11? People that learned Unix in that same time period are still getting mileage out of their skills (and they have got some cool new toys to boot).
It has become almost an axiom in the computer industry that once the cost of migration is the only reason not to switch from a product, the product is doomed. Microsoft is no exception. On the one hand Microsoft is forced to say that switching to Linux would cost companies too much money, but on the other hand they want these same companies to make a switch that is almost as radical. They want companies to pull out their NT servers and put in Windows 2000.
"if not more unfriendly (this may change when the KDE IDE is finished)"
Ok, define "friendly".
Is it an IDE? Linux has several mature ones- SourceNavigator and Code Crusader come immediately to mind (Not to mention that SourceNavigator's cross-platform and will work under Windows...). There's several less mature ones that are immediately usable (KDE's one included in that list...) If you're using the criterion, "works exactly like Visual Studio" as "friendly" you're in for a rude awakening- most of that environ is NOT easy or friendly past the simplest of applications.
"text-based debugging sucks ass."
Uh, let's see how many non-text based debuggers for UNIX/Linux I can name right off the top of my head...
KDebug, Code Medic, Source Insight, and DDD.
That's four of them. All "GUI", source level debuggers- with DDD being able to display graphs of data areas.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
One of the complaints that he made was that there was no "friendly" IDEs for UNIX (which is patently WRONG)- if you go about what you're suggesting, you're going to do the same thing.
With Linux (and to a lesser extent, UNIX) you can have your cake and eat it too. The friendly IDE, compiler, debugger (which, I seriously doubt is free from MS in the case of Windows code- and without it, better not be doing COM/DCOM stuff, you'll need that debugger if you run into problems!), the bounds checking tools, etc. for FREE.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
Just last night, I saw a commercial for a Fisher-Price baby's toy. I didn't think anything of it (I was in the middle of a huge election debate at the time ;) but just before it ended it mentioned "Built on Microsoft's [something I can't remember] Technology", taking up the whole screen, then it went back to the baby being a happy baby playing with this thing.
Screw the developer tools M$ is trying to shove down adolscents (sp?) throats, theyre going after the newborns too! Even their Barney toy went after 4-5 year olds, this one if going for the kids barely even out of their crib!
/me runs away screaming
Anywho, I thought it was kinda creepy, and this story was a good place to put it.
we are building a religion
a limited edition
we are now accepting callers
for these pendant key chains
Don't bother. The market is driven by business needs. Microsoft is wasting its money just like Apple did.
When and if business decides that it needs better performance, reliability and security at a lower price (and sadly for Apple ease of use means nothing for bosses who don't use what they stick the employees with,) you can look forward to massive acceptance of Linux.
Apple's ace in the hole is style because their equipment has it (but not a lot of people need it.)
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
Heh, heh, heh. You sure that's not Disfunction? (I'm not sure you should really call it a ``curriculum'' either.) It looks like basic vocation training to me. Does an ability to drag and drop components from a menu make one a programmer? They likely will have nearly no idea why what they're doing is working (or not). Microsoft tools are like Hamburger Helper and no one would consider someone who can whip up something out of HH a chef.
What's next: Someone who slaps a motherboard and a few cards into a case will begin thinking they're an electronics engineer? Puhleez!
Every time I hear about these company-sponsored training programs I'm reminded of an old Isaac Asimov short story (whose name escapes me at the moment). The hero of the story was disappointed that he wouldn't be receiving specific training and runs away only to find that he'd been pulled aside because he was smart. Everyone else was learning just enough to get by and if they weren't specifically trained for a task they weren't capable of handling it. Are we creating a generation of people who can only use the products that they were trained on? Who will be capable of creating tomorrow's products? Does anyone really think this is what an educational system should be doing?
--
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
If I was teaching a programming class, I would use Pascal or Ada-95, which are not available from Microsoft.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
YES we need to be indoctrinating children! I teach a class full of wiggly third graders in the South Bronx. They love computers, but we have not been able to scrounge together the teachers and machines necessary to give them the opportunity to. And when we do, they will be using all Microsoft products, and learning more about word processing than they will about programming.
We are creating a caste of unskilled computer users this way. We shouldn't pooh-pooh the so-called "digital divide"-- it is a buzzword, and more of these kids have computers at home than you would think, but I can tell you the way these kids are learning to use computers is going to put them at a lifelong disadvantage. One of my kids told me the other day that he only uses a voice-input system with his computer-- doesn't touch the keyboard at all. They mostly access the Internet through AOL. They don't have access to stuff like Logo or Basic which would teach them the rudiments of programming
These kids are capable and eager to learn. The other day I taught one of them to count in binary-- now if only I had some way of helping him put that to practical use...
If anyone is working in New York City and looking for something good to do for the community, send me email. I want to help get more tech people involved in helping my community-- OUR way, not Microsoft's!
I for one learned to program with Linux rather than Windows because all the tools were free under Linux. Is one of the things that first brought me to Linux. I started w/ BASIC and Batch files and quickly got bored of their limited appeal and I certainly couldn't afford M$ tools so I started C w/ some free mini-compilers included with some learn C books and then I figured out that the Unix systems my university had had C compilers on them so I started programming using them. Then I started using my friends Linux boxes that were online to code and finally switched to my own Linux box when my parents were done with our first PC. Then I got into web programming, databases, objects oriented and logic oriented programming and at every turn my Linux box did more for less (for free actually) than Windows could so I've never looked back. If Microsoft wants a chance of keeping Linux from killing them they should make all their developer tools free. Otherwise the smart kids are going to slowly leak out into the Linux world.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
If Microsoft is getting their tools in the hands of the programmers of the future, what can we do to achieve the same?
Depends on the age of the 'young people'. Probably depends on lots of things, but age determines whether they are more influenced by peers or school. If they want to be rebels, then having MS as the authority figure may be counter productive for MS.
Wouldn't it be much better if kids could take a look at development on several different platforms so that they can better use the technology when they are professionals rather than settling on "what they know"?
Yep. But you're really asking two questions:
"Is it better to have more experience?" and
"will they get stuck in whatever they learnt first?"
One of the cool things about reading /. is that a non programmer like myself can hear lots of different POV based on all the different experiences that IT people have had. Before I read /. I had never heard of lots of stuff that was never mentioned in Byte (printed).
As for whether people will get stuck with whatever they are told first, that depends on whether they are Christians or not... er... I mean, it depends on whether they are open-minded-rational-truth-seekers or pre-rational-insecure-believers. If you are interested in understanding and quality, then you'll question what you are told anyway, unless 'thinking' is not on the curriculum. (Perhaps this is what Bertrand Russell meant about people being made stupid by education).
It's like, it depends on the quality of the education, "make a list of the pros and cons of this tool" vs. "solution providers are always called Microsoft",
and it depends on the the quality of recruitment in the IT industry, "HR checklist" vs. "qualified peer review".
The tone of the question is, I feel, along the lines of "think of the innocent children/why don't we indoctrinate them too?", but I'm suggesting it's not so easy, because by the time they get to school age they have already aquired so much cultural baggage anyway.... kinda offtopic, yeah, but I feel the question just reflects some sad aspects of our system.
Do you understand the economics of what you're talking about? There is a concept called total cost of ownership, and this states that the initial cost of a computer system is not the TOTAL cost of said computer. You have to figure in the cost (time-wise) for a new system to be set up and the cost (time-wise) for people to learn how to use it. If you already have a Windows environment set up and running it is going to cost you alot of money to migrate that environment to another operating system. Yes maybe Linux is more stable than Windows but that doesn't make it any better. Most people don't give a shit about the OS they are using, they just want to get their work done and turn the fucking thing off. This apathy means they are not going to take a deep and meaningful interest in the specifics of computer science. When they get out of school they are going to be exposed mostly to MS based systems as that is the majority of consumer OSes out there. Why ought they be force fed CS when what they really need is a technology training course. You're also missing the fact that software companies (yes even M$) offer large educational discounts to schools, Advanced Server is something students really need to know how to interact with unless they plan to run their own IT department which most don't.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
The problem with hiring someone to do work over the summer is that it costs money, monewy I know many school districs can't afford. At my old high school we had a programming lab filled with older Macs that had Codewarrior (IIRC) on them. The computers were slow as can be and could barely perform the tasks you wanted to get done but the school simply could not afford new computer hardware. Besides the price aspect you also have to remember that sometimes districs don't allow schools to bring in outside consultants because of different types of liability. You have to get someone hired by the districs that can come back in six months or a year when you need something else or need some problem solving. Idealy schools ought to have masses of computers implimented well in all the classrooms but the sad fact is that costs way too much money even for schools to impliment on a ten year basis (which by default render the hardware and software obsolete which makes your whole venture a waste of time and money).
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
Don't know about emacs, I use vi. I think you have to trade some simplicity in order to get the power that you want from your tools - setting up similarly complex macros in MS Word would be difficult too, I imagine. Possibly more difficult, since I can't imagine a macro language more well-laid-out than one based on LISP, but maybe that's just the LISP partisan in me :)
FUD. Maybe you shouldn't get your info from Unix haters (although it was a funny chapter on X, I'll admit) - you can develop with Gtk+ or QT just as easily as MFC, or you could do even easier stuff like using Perl/Tk. X windows has supported TrueType fonts for years now - any shipping Linux distribution will have a font server that supports TrueType fonts, and information on how to copy over and set up your Windows fonts is available on the 'net.
X just looks terrible, until you realize that the X guys grokked networked computing years before anybody in Redmond. If you want the power, you have added complexity.
I'll admit that I did have some problems with that install, but most of those were related to accidentally trashing my /var partition and losing my RPM database :( Here's a tip - go to www.gnome.org, follow the links to install Gnome, and never look back. This Helix stuff rocks.
Actually, if I had to reinstall all over again, I'd probably install Debian rather than the Mandrake that I started with. The only complaint that I have about Mandrake's RPM handling was that if you download a package and it has other unmet dependencies, you have to go back to RPMfind.net, look for the package, lather, rinse, repeat. By contrast, on my Debian server it's apt-get and let the machine figure out and install the updates. You should give it a try some time.
Can't help you with the shell scripting, but I think it is easier than doing everything in C or C++. Maybe try Perl for your scripting needs?
As far as arcane commands go, the advantage of them is that they are standard across all Unices and haven't changed in years (OK, the GNU versions added some options). I haven't found them to be poorly documented, if anything they're overdocumented in the interests of making them usable for many many things.
There's a difference between teaching programming and system administration/package management, though. All of the complaints that you have wouldn't be an issue on a current Debian/Gnome system, to my knowledge. Although it doesn't sound like you're in a mood to go back and give it a try just yet :)
Your right to not believe: Americans United for Separation of Church and
>Since when is Unix "friendly" in any sense of the word?
:)
.sig.. if it ever worked it would be a user friendly command line.... it never did.. not correctly...
From conseption to 1995...
After the release of Windows 95 anything not GUI is not user friendly.
In short.. 20 years of user friendly operating systems vanish and preveously user hostile GUI environments get called "friendly"
How can Windows 3.11 and Windows NT 4 be called user friendly and have it not extend to Unix when Windows 3.11 and Win NT 4 takes it's UI from Unix... to be exact.. Motif...
Simple.. Motif is an interface layor nothing more.. Unix remains in control... Windows 3.11 however is in control not dos..
When to GUI is in control it's user friendly... ease of use and learnning curve be dammed..
I find only experenced computer users consider Windows to be "User Friendly" and I have an idea as to why...
Experenced users don't have a learnning curve.. You allready understand how computers work it's a short jump to understanding "THIS" system.. You allready know the basic details. It takes a very small amount of guesswork..
But a newbie dosn't have this experence to work with. He dosn't know how to dubble click.. He really is starting fresh... The learnning curve is MASIVE.
I need to explain myself for a moment...
Non expert people whom techs would normally run into can.. as a rule.. get a tech to help them when they need help.
But a lot of people don't have even a few techs to help them out.
I ware so many hats that often people DO NOT know they can turn to me for help.. and they can not turn to anyone else. It is from thies people I get a real understanding of the futility they feel when using Windows.
"To use a computer requires a PHD in computer science"
I hear this A LOT
Most of the time it's a person who gave up after trying to use Windows...
User friendly is anything with both a short learnning curve and easy to use.
Unix is easy to use.. piriod...
Linux has a long learnning curve.. but GUI destros like Mandrake are cutting that down...
BSD has allways had a reasonably short learnning curve.. maybe not as short as people would like but for what BSD is... having a short learnning curve is pritty dang smacking cool...
The reason given for why operating systems that were called "user friendly" pre 1995 no longer have this status is "changing terminology"..
The only posable change is redefinning "user friendly" to mean "GUI imbeded in the kernel".
However imbeding the GUI in the kernel dosn't make an os easy and it's absence form the kernel dosn't make it hard.
It's quite posable to have a os with no GUI at all and it still be easy to use and learn...
It is also quite posable to have an os with a GUI and have it be imposable to use and learn...
For this I present... BSD and Windows...
Windows "You need a PHD in computer science to use a computer"
BSD "I learnned to use computers in collage.. it was easy"
BSD shell account is considerably easyer than Windows...
I've used a SunOs shell account... bliss... a well admined SunOs shell account I might add.. but hay
BTW the worlds worst os I refered to in my
I don't actually exist.
Oh man... a Rush Open-Source parody! I love it!!!!!!! Genius!
To the editors: your English is as bad as your Perl. Please go back to grade school.
We don't need to worry - unix has the "natural appeal" for aspiring programmers.
Let me guess, you're an Unix zealot. Only someone who's been completely indoctrinated to the New Jersey Cause would honestly think that Unix is "natural". If you got out of your coccoon for a while, you'd see that not everyone thinks like you, not everyone worships Unix. This "natural appeal" nonsense is like a priest saying that Christianity has the "natural appeal" for children - pure drivel.
And, with unix,they get all the necessary tools for free.
Oh, please. Just as you can pay a bundle for, say, Sun's "official" development kits for C++ or Fortran in Solaris, you can pay nothing for Cygnus' port of the GNU development software to Windows. Unix isn't in itself any less proprietary or commercial than Windows.
To the editors: your English is as bad as your Perl. Please go back to grade school.
"We don't like it that Microsoft is indoctrinating our kids, so we should... do the exact same thing"?!? As another poster pointed out, this seems like nothing but ABMS (Anything But Microsoft Syndrome) on Slashdot's part.
The only honest thing someone can do about this is take it to the parents: "Mrs Blum, did you know that your school's computer education programme is limiting little Jimmy's future career opportunities? You didn't? Well, lemme tell you all about how they're forcing him to learn nothing but limited tools from a company that might be broken up at any time now. If this goes on, when little Jimmy graduates, he'll have no prospective employers!"
And to the schools too: "Mr Principal, I've heard that a lot of moms are planning to take their kids out of your school... why? Well, it seems your Microsoft-sponsored comp. ed. programme is woefully inadequate compared to Next Door High's platform-independent programme devised by actual CS. professionals... how about that?"
To the editors: your English is as bad as your Perl. Please go back to grade school.
Who said that? Go learn to read.
To the editors: your English is as bad as your Perl. Please go back to grade school.
Based on who's criteria? Windows? Every time I've installed or upgraded Windows on a Compaq machine, I've not had problems, even if it's from a 'pure' Microsoft distribution (i.e. not shipped with the system). If it's Linux, then yes, I can at least with my own experience say that Compaq has problems with some pieces of just about every distribution I've worked with. I find it ironic considering that Compaq has more than once advertised their Linux systems (Alphas) via click ads on Slashdot.
I regularly buy low cost motherboards from Taiwan with built-in everything and get Debian up and running in no time.
Two comments here.
>> and when I've tried to test the 2.4.0-test10 kernel, I loose the network card
The word test isn't there because it looks cool, it means 'TEST', not 'ready to go out of the box'. Unless you want to TEST, don't use a test kernel.
Well, excuse me. Based on an earlier article posted on slashdot (http://slash dot.org
"There are no known showstoppers, but I've asked all the major Linux houses to start deploying the current test kernels internally and start it through their test cycles," Torvalds said. "We've already found a few things that way, and hopefully, a month of this will shake out the worst.",
I felt that test10 was reasonably stable and close to being usable by mere mortals such as myself. That meant that stuff working reasonably well in the 2.2 kernel series would continue to work in the late 2.4 test series. I should have realized that it's probably another false hope, like the announcements in April and May. I stand corrected.
A school that just wants to plug in and go should buy their machines pre-configured and tested. If they choose a Linux based machine, they stand to save a lot of money.
Again, the comment concerning money saved is based on what studies, what public statistics to back this up? My personal experience is that after the initial cost of the software, the amount of time required to manage either system is the real clincher on cost, and it's generally a wash. If you hire good sysadmins for either system, both can be managed efficiently. But hire a mouthbreather in either position and you'll pay the price on higher maintainance costs due to induced downtimes. If it's the hardware, I've found that buying a reliable whitebox will cost you as much as an equivalent name-brand system. You get what you pay for, and if you trim the costs on the front end you'll usually get bit on back-end maintainance costs.
If the goal is to really teach kids about computers inside and out, they'll need one where looking inside is encouraged, not one that tries it's best to keep the hidden parts a secret. Imagine an auto mechanics course where the cars all have their hoods welded shut.
Over the past few decades, Microsoft and others have published rack after rack of information on operating system and application internals. Yes, there have been authors such as Andrew Schulman (Unauthorized Windows 95, etc) who've made a cottage industry out of documenting those dark corners that Microsoft 'forgot', but the system has been heavily documented based on customer feedback and need.
I mention Windows 95 because Microsoft needed to be dope slapped over the out-and-out lies concerning fundamental features of the OS. Andrew Schulman and others performed a great service in showing the emperor was a little bare in spots. But so should IBM on failing to take advantage of an incredible marketing opportunity in its inability to sell OS/2 over Win95. 1995 had to be the Year of the Software Clusterfuck.
In any event, the hood is not welded shut on that late model Windows system, any more than it's welded shut on anything else. In fact, based on some other comments concerning the teaching of C++ on Windows, the best environment is to get the (!free) Borland 5.5 command line compiler (and don't forget Turbo Debugger), and use that with Cygwin tools to teach a solid standard's compliant C++ course (don't use current gcc 2.59.2!). Then, if they want to teach widget programming on Windows, they can get an educational discount on the Borland Standard version and teach that portion of Windows. Want to teach Java? You've got everything from Sun's JDK and an editor (of which there are many) to an IDE such as Sun's Forte Community or Borland's JBuilder 4 Community. You can teach a tremendous amount concerning systems design, protocols, UI interaction, etc with Java. Oh. I forget. Java's not Politically Correct either. Oh, well.
A version of BeOS from 2000 on a 1997 machine, compared with versions of Linux from 1997 on the 1997 machine and from 2000 on a 2000 machine? Or did i miss something in your argument?
I probably wasn't clear enough, my apologies. The best of the list to run on the Deskpro was Mandrake 7.1. It installed and ran out-of-the-box as well as any Windows release. I also installed BeOS 5 Pro next to it as well, just for the reference and the ability to do some testing. So the old Deskpro 2000 (from 1997) was running Windows 98SE, Mandrake 7.1, and BeOS 5. But this was after getting a 3dfx Voodoo 3000, a PCI modem that was not a Winmodem, and a 10/100 NIC that the TULIP drivers would recongnize on the Linux system.
This is not indoctrination. This program teaches children how to program. It is completely unrealistic to expect that Microsoft would use GNU or BSD tools when they already have their own. No one would bitch of Redhat/Cygnus had a similar program that used Cygnus/GNU tools, so why are we being selective in our standards?
If you don't like this Microsoft-centric approach, then create your own curriculum. I used to teach programming to elementary students (using LOGO and Pascal). I used a variety of tools, but if Apple, Microsoft, Borland, or anyone else would have offered me the use of their hardware or software, I would have jumped at the chance. It's time we stopped dumping on Microsoft for doing what anyone else would do, and start doing stuff for ourselves.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
We've done something a bit like this. It's based on Tk rather than gtk, but other than that it's more or less what you want: a simple canvas to draw on and a bunch of worksheets for beginners to programming. It was done for LiveWires, a Christian computer camp. You can get our old (1999) stuff here. We did some extra things for the 2000 holiday this summer which we've not released yet. They'll be released under a BSD-ish licence soon: I'm in the middle of writing a mail to our webmaster to get him to put them up. Keep watching the LiveWires site or mail me if you can't wait for us to sort it out.
Oh, yes, when you want to find all lines in a file with "1999", change all "1999" to "2000", and sort the result, instead of using three Unix commands piped together it's so much easier with Windows to...um... what?
In the UK, i've been worried about this special deal that teachers get - They get subsidised training, computers and software but of course it HAS to be Microsoft, They get Windows2000 and Office 2000.
In a lot of ways its good, because the UK could do with more computer-literate teachers, but to push office tools onto them provides them with something that they don't need, causes incompatibilities with school systems which are usually running what was state of the art maybe 4 years ago and I believe a certain amount of pro-microsoft evangelism goes on.
When the heads of Blackthorn and Thumbswood schools here asked me about it (I've provided good advice in the past) I suggested throwing away Office2000 and running Office97 for compatibility with the school.
Personally though, I don't think the school children should have access to high versions of word for the same reason that you should learn to do maths without a calculator - these word versions will spell-check and prompt all sorts of other things the children should know how to do themselves. Microsoft "write" should be enough.
-- Don't believe everything you read, hear or think
It has, because its full of cozy little myths and stories that appeal to children. How many other religions can compete with "baby Jesus"?
Seriously, Unix has a natural appeal to programmers the same way sports cars have a natural appeal to grease monkeys. Just 'cause it's a stereotypes doesn't make it less true, on average.
You know, the thing that bugs me more than zealotry is blind anti-zealotry, attributing zealotry where none exists. "Oh, look at me! I have contrarian opinion! I'm not sheep like the rest of you!" And people mod it up as if it makes them special too.
--
Bush's assertion: there ought to be limits to freedom
Umm... how do you do graphical debugging as opposed to text-based?
Go to line of code.
Insert breakpoint (rightmouse in border/hit toolbar/hit F8 - take your pick).
Hit Go (F5)
Mouse over variable. Hey! It's the value of the variable.
Open the callstack! Hey! It's onscreen with my code.
Open the register list -- hey they're onscreen too!
Look at the disassembly -- with source in the window next to it.
Add a watch... hey! I've got this tree of the objects in the structure I'm looking at, and I can expand the bits that I need/close the bits I don't.
It's the difference between this:
KDBG screenshot, and this:
a sample GDB session
Simon
Coming soon - pyrogyra
The funny thing was that I was pushing Linux and open-source software and he was bashing it. That is until he actually had to install Corel Linux on a machine (can't remember the reason) and he (not too happily) had to admit that it was extremely easy to install and configure when he did it.
Funny... when I tried to install Corel Linux, it repeatedly gave me the finger. Literally.
Nice splash screen. Installs a bit. Ejects CD tray, pulls tray back in, reboots. Nice splash screen. Installs (same bit). Ejects CD tray, pulls back tray back in (I grabbed the disk that time). Reboots. Nice splash screen. Installs same thing *again*, pulls tray back in, reboots.
AGHHHHHH!!!!!!
Si
Coming soon - pyrogyra
I'm paid very well to work on Zelerate AllCommerce, an open-source e-commerce package. I'm making twice as much as I did when I programmed proprietary apps for Windows.
Besides, most programming jobs are not for software that will every be sold. Most programming jobs are for software that will be used internally to a company or custom software for another company.
Having recently been involved in the job market here in Silicon Valley (job market == friendly, housing market == ABSOLUTE HELL), I would guestimate that if you want to get a job fast, learn perl, HTML, java, at least basic Unix usage, and the phrase "I don't know that in-depth, but I've played with it and I'm positive I can pick it up quickly."
Teaching kids to "use" computer to get other things done -- no tech interest -- put em on a Windows box. It's what they're going to have to use once they walk out the door.
Only if you are talking about upper secondary and tertiary students. Even then the argument is suspect where Microsoft like to change the user interface every couple of years. With younger children what they will use when they "walk out the door" probably hasn't been invented yet.
A school that wants to provide an education should teach on machines that are the ones used outside of schools. Sorry, but that means Windows.
An argument applied nowhere else in education. Best throw out must of the curriculum because it's "not used outside school" too!
How exactly does one insert comments into the registry (ala an apache/bind/whatever config)?
Or comment out an existing value, so it can still be seen...
If anything, Windows is easier to install on a homemade box than Linux.
Assuming you don't count the reboots also want to try '95 on a fast AMD from scratch?
Note that 3) is a (stripped down) copy of 4) and you'll understand why they pick 4) and not 1) or 2).
More likely a reason to pick 3 over 4. Since "stripped down" can translate into "has what is needed without bells and whistles".
a poor MSCE and a healthy dose of reboot/reformat/reinstall usually works for most windeows boxen
So remember to add all those man hours to the TCO. With anything other than a trival number of machines you could be talking multiple "poor MSCEs" too.
IT/IS directors and admins for many school boards like the ability to buy a system/OS that meets their schools needs out of the ups box,
If this really were the criteria being applied then Windows with it's lack of robustness (in a hostile user environment), poor multi user support, fault fixing which requires a priest as often and an engineer, etc. would be at the bottom of the list.
What about peronal investments> All those people who spent all that time on getting an MCSE and now it's useless. Time to go through it all again to get re-certified for Windows 2000.
It's stupid. Learn the services and capabilities, not specific OS details. Like, I know what DHCP is and I know Windows NT and 2000 do it. So why would I really need to know how to configure it ahead of time step-by-step and from memory? If the day comes when I need DHCP and if I decide not to run it on a UNIX box, then I'll open up the docs on DHCP on Windows 2000 and figure out how to configure it. Big deal.
Another counterpoint is that technology is constantly evolving, and what students use in school today is not what they will use in their jobs. For example, the Mac's System 7 would likely have been better "training" for Windows 9x than Windows 3.1 would have been.
How to solve most of our problems: 1.Lots of nuclear plants. 2.Cure aging.
... and normally it's the way they first learned. So once they learned to progam in a MS environment they will stay with it. Think vi and emacs, most use one or the other but not both and normally they stay with what they happened to use first.
So this is a smart move by MS marketing, the Students at Universities will ask for an MS environment, like the one they got used to instead of learning the UNIX way of doing things. The problem i see here is not MS ensuring that there will be people using their programming environment in the future, but that people in the MS-environment don't see the line between original C and the standard libraries available in each environment on the one hand and MS "inventions" on the other. And we all know how much MS likes to screw widely accepted standards.
"By the way if anyone here is in advertising or marketing... kill yourself." -- Bill Hicks
The article MainFunction.com points at is from
the 8th International Python Conference. As someone who personally knows the teacher involved, and talked to him a lot about that, let me just mention that he's using Linux to teach Python.
In fact, part of the work his students are doing is in Zope (http://www.zope.org). So, Microsoft is essentially pointing to an article by a teacher who believes in 100% open source. They're doing our work for us!
The children today don't have a chance to learn programming as we - the elder ones - had. We had computers with limited graphics resources - so no games like the ones today. And most of all we had BASIC IN ROM ! M$ dropped even QBASIC from their O.S. distributions - you have to pay good money for a programming language in m$ win.
I started with a speccy 48k clone and with a bad audio tape deck that could not load the game tapes from my friends - so i learned BASIC from the book included with the computer. Today's kids don't have a chance with Win* : they will press the power button, and put the CD in drive. autoload kicks in and they're in the game. What incentive to learn programming do they have ?
We need ROM BASIC back. Don't buy your children the US version of Sony Playstation 2, get instead the UK one - the one with basic included.
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1% APY, No fees, Online Bank https://captl1.co/2uIErYq Don't let your $$$ sit in a no-interest acct.
Let me tell you of the severity:
The teacher said this:
It scared me badly. Very badly. The other students laughed. I got angry. We had to put up computer stuff on the walls, so one person made a picture of a guy wearing a linux hat and a tshirt that said:
It is making fun of me. Everyone makes fun of linux. They all say it sucks. Not a single person in that room(except for me and my friends) have very even seen linux running before, much less used it. This brings me to the main point of my argument:
Unless free software and open source companies/groups have programs to teach kids like me to use free/opensource software, most kids will just use windows, and never even know what linux or free software is
So, please help kids to stay away from the evils of Microsoft. VALinux/penguin computing: give computers to schools! It is tax deductable, and will help students learn about your computers(and linux). If they realize how great linux is, and how high quality VALinux/penguin computing computers are, they will buy them later in life. I don't want to have a future full of republicans and Micro-serfs for peers. Everyone knows the UNIX is on its way back in, so why not teach people how to use it. It is up to you as responsable software engineers, programs, web designers, and just plain free software / open-source fanatics to make sure my generation does not become beholden to commercial software interests. Stand up! Fight for your right! To use free software. All the RMS's and ESR's of the world, try to talk to local high schools when you are on trips to areas! Large companies that sell linux stuff, donate computers and other equipment to school(making sure it goes to the computer science classes...at my school, the typing class has pentium 3's, and the computer science class has 11 year old 25Mhz 486's)! The war is about to be fought. Don't let us lose it.
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HAL 7000, fewer features than the HAL 9000, but just as homicidal!
Unix isn't in itself any less proprietary or commercial than Windows.
'Scuse me? Care to lay off the bong for a little while?
Well what you say is *partially* correct. UNIX (the commercial product, of which very little remains) itself is pretty much closed, but when the man above said "Unix," he was referring to the Unix philosophy, ideals, and practice. When I speak of Unix in this manner, I am not just talking about the commericial product (which, btw, isn't actually called UNIX anymore), but rather the range of OSes that follow the UNIX philosophy such as Linux, FreeBSD, even QNX, BeOS, or MacOS X in a loose sort of way.
Mustn't take everything so literal, lad.
C:\Windows\regedit.exe
The registry is not meant to be edited directly. Also, many programs (the open-source ones, at least) don't usually use the registry at all and have regular fun little text config files that we're all used to.
Too many instructors fall to the temptation to teach how to code fancy widgets. Students get away from learning the language and instead spend too much time learning all about MFC. Learning programming using C or a real C course should teach C.
I think this is true, but it's not just Microsoft and Visual Basic and MFC.
For example, how many Java books don't ASSUME you'd be using class Applet ? How many assume you're more interested in Swing? It's only after three years that any Java books have begun to focus on servlets and other non-GUI tasks.
[
Aren't they worried that familiarization will only breed contempt? ;-)
Programming is Natural because it satisfies Man's basic desire -- building. Programming happens when a man decides he wishes to define his knowledge, that he might refer to his work to guide him foreward.
The end of a program is a solution to a problem. In fact, the program itself perfectly defines both the problem and the solution. As does any totally volitional human act.
A young woman with a computer will discover abstract pattern and utilize it in real life before her peers without computers.
Computer software is as imaginary as a fable. To the person who sees the logic and applies it to her life, then does it become real.
As for the specific issue in this thread -- does it matter? Microsoft is transient. Unix is transient. Is soap defined by Lever 2000, Ivory? The world of software is as eternal as intelligence. Intelligence lasts longer than ideology or brand.
Anyone learning anything about computers is adding value to their life, and in turn, adding value to all our lives as they join us on the web.
I would gamble that most of the people reading this post who program got their start on a PC running DOS or Windows.. Whether you turned to unix or not, it is your desire to improve the world you live in, or program in, that determined your path. It probably wasn't the market share of one company or another in end-user software.
I wonder how many open-source unix nuts are going to bubble out of these Microsoft workshops... and how many young stars will evolve the software for their own ends -- the desire to build and shine at it.
That there are workshops at all is grand! Regardless of party, kids on computers in any setting is noble. When a kid see the power that is before her, she will want more. And the kid that learns programming will be a rational human being.
Cheesily yours,
Joshua
... we shouldn't be indoctrinating anyone. The title of this article is just horrible. Microsoft is doing something so we should too? Perish the thought.
That said, the content, once I got past that idiotic title, was good, and thought provoking. Everyone should read that second link, and the idea of building an armoury of Free textbooks and coursework for learning to use Free systems and tools is a fine one. I know there are already a few works like this available, a site that simply linked those already existing, and new ones as they become available, would be a great contribution.
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Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
Anyone who thinks that unix, with its wonderfully arcane command line tools, has "natural appeal" for aspiring programmers, should slap themselves twice and think again.
My university, and many like it, teach on Unix.
But they don't do it so that we're "used to" Unix or the syntax of C++ or ML; they try to teach us an understanding of computer science at a deeper level so that we can take on any language/platform with ease. Unix just happens to be a convenient way to do this because of its superior multi-user support and tools (and sometimes, price).
I did heavy basic from the time I was pretty young (we had a PCjr with a BASIC cartridge when I was but a mere geeklette) and learned it a lot deeper when I entered high school. qbasic has the ability to ruin a programmer--I used it. Extensively. Now that I'm in college and trying to learn C++, I'm having a very hard time.
....OTOH, I find it a lot easier to type
g++ -o executable file.cpp implementation.cpp
than do all that crap with MSVC++ in a lab, make a new workspace, new Win32 console app, all that.
But yeah, your mileage may vary with BASIC. When I get older and have kids, I wouldn't want to teach it to them. That might just be me.
Angry IT woman in big clompy boots. And talking lint!.
So it boils down to which tool is used to hammer in the code. Or are you saying you're programming from behind the keyboard without thinking about design of the code? If you do, please, sit down next to those kids who learn how to program because you're doing it wrong then.
programming is designing code to execute an algorithm. First design the algorithm, then project that on a programming language. When done, pick an editor, hammer in the code, compile, enjoy.
So, now these kids use MS tools to hammer in the code. Is their programming any different? No. The basics are still the same. If a student doesn't understand that what he is being thaught is uniform no matter what tool is used, he/she shouldn't be taking the programming class in the first place because he/she doesn't understand the principles of programming at all. (example: "I don't like that university because they don't teach me programming in java").
So to let the kids/students be able to hammer in the code as EASY as possible, which of the following would you prefer (mind you: they don't have any skills in the tools, they don't know how they work): 1) VI, 2) EMACS, 3) KDevelop, 4) MS Devstudio.
3) and 4) are way, way more easy to use/work with than 1) and 2) by the programming focussed student. Note that 3) is a (stripped down) copy of 4) and you'll understand why they pick 4) and not 1) or 2).
If someone takes this situation as "MS indoctrination", that person doesn't understand what programming is all about and doesn't understand that to be ABLE to produce GOOD and WORKING code, you should be working with the tool that makes you hammer in / test/debug/tweak the code as easy and as smoothly as possible.
Oh... and don't come to me gdb is more easy to use than MSDevstudio debugger ;). For the skilled developer perhaps, who has lived all his life inside vi/emacs and gdb. Not for the starting developer.
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Never underestimate the relief of true separation of Religion and State.
Next I moved into the Dos/win3.1 world and found QBasic which was alot like apple except for the graphics end and also had a large user group and nice documentation. Hence I began to take my knowledge of Apple IIe's Basic and program on QBasic.
After a while I found HTML. Like Basic this language was easy and had pleanty of documentation for it. So I started creating webpages. Then along came CGI and JavaScript. So my webpages began to do all kinds of neat things.
Now that I'm in college I'm learning C++. And I'm making programs for not only win32, but also Linux and BeOS ...
So your theory that "Learn on MS always use MS" really doesn't hold much water with me.
Ignore the "p2p is theft" trolls, they're just uninformed
So what are the basics?
Assembly language?
Functions and variables?
Classes and objects?
Command line programming?
GUI programming?
Data types. Loops. Functions. Microsoft development tools just have too much between you and the code I think.
It's just my opinion of course, but I think a command line shell is just a better idea, it gives them the right mental image. That snippet of code you posted (I'm assuming slashdot stripped out the stdio.h after #include) would work on both systems, but the program would be a lot more bloated on windows. Where is the code that defines the window geometry? I'm assuming MS just adds it to the executable, but what happens when we want them to code in a more complex environment? If you hold their hand too much they won't learn the basics, and we'll just have a generation of programmers who only know "visual" languages.
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At my college setting up the Linux machines is done by the SysAdmin. The SysAdmin recommends hardware that will be Linux compatible (nothing like a Compaq with a USB keyboard) and installs and readies Linux on one machine. After that, the hard drives are just duplicated. After that there is a whole lab of machines happily running Linux.
I would love to see Linux support every possible hardware combo out there, but if you are going to shell out the cash for a system to run Linux please make sure you have compatible hardware. If a school can't be bothered to figure out that they should use standard, supported hardware, they really don't care about Linux.
I also like how you burst into praising Windows like it is the greatest thing since sliced bread. Truthfully you sound more like a Microsoft Schill than a Linux Zealot.
Everytime you look at porn a devil gets their horns.
Check out http://www.seul.org for some projects relating to linux in education. Dan
How exactly does one insert comments into the registry (ala an apache/bind/whatever config)?
There's not much difference between using regedit to edit the registry and using a text editor to edit config files.
Uhhh, yes there is. With config files, the options are almost always readable enough to where you can at least get an idea of what does what, whereas with the registry, you have to try and figure out what "CrypticOptionX 0x98300103" does.
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I pledge allegiance to the flag...
of the Corporate States of America...
Sounds very much like AT&T and their policy of giving UNIX source to educational institutions on the cheap.
Chances are if kiddies go through university using unix they will prefer to use it once out in the wide wide world.
I strongely believe that HTML is a great first step for a young programmer, because of the fact that is it simple and it gives big results fast. Even though HTML isn't a real programming language Javascript always seem to come into play really fast for a young Hypertext Markuper.
After that Perl, PHP, etc can be introduced. The point is that web programming gives fast graphical results that kids crave. And learning PHP and/or Perl is good IMO because I feel that every good programmer should know at least a few C-like programming languages.
Hell, after that teach them SQL and they are basically ready to go out and get a job!
I guess the way I feel about it is that teaching a kid Logo is nice, but is he/she really going to use it later on?
-Gnight
On the face if it MS is "indoctrinating" the people that are being taught but, be honest, how many people who work on UNIX plaforms took their first step on MS platforms? I did and the majority of the people I know did as well and in my opinion as long as people are coding and the UNIX platforms remain a good base for programmers, people will move over to them as they discover the advantages themselves.
I agree with all of the sentiments that you express in your post, but I'd like to emphasize that the question posed is should we place more emphasis on getting young people to use open source systems in school. My response is a resounding yes, and here is my reasoning. I use Windows, Linux and OpenBSD at home, they all have their purposes and strengths and weaknesses. I have Windows for my USB card reader for my digital still camera and games plus Corel Photo-Paint until I become more proficient with the Gimp, Linux and OpenBSD for learning / practicing C/C++, Perl and shell programming and secure firewall services.
But here's my tale of learning C++ at a local college in a continuing education class. The entire college is Microsoft, all the latest versions of the various pieces of MS software. First of all, they got cooked good by an email virus one time so the entire school network was unavailable at least one day (could have been more, our class was only Mondays and Wednesdays, and I didn't bother to inquire) while they were determining the extent of the damage and selected workstations unavailable other days because they were being disinfected. Now this is mostly a matter of poor administration & setup, but as an IT professional I see it as being susceptible because of their complete dependence on MS products, and I object to having to my educational time disrupted bad decision-making on the college's part.
Our C++ class only involved learning the basics of OOP design and implementation, so we were creating a very straightforward Win32 console app (no chance to teach fancy widgets, which I think disappointed him - see next para). It's perfectly fine to use MS Visual Studio for this, it's actually a decent program to use (in my experience anyways) to code and debug your code. But our instructor was very pro-MS and one of the things that made me laugh was that MS' implementation of C++ breaks the ANSI/ISO published standards for inheritance!
Furthermore, he insisted on telling the class that "You'll never do this stuff in real life." He felt that we would all be doing Windows programs where we would have to learn to hook a GUI up to the backend logic pieces. Since I work with OS/390 and AIX at work, I made a point of bringing up to him that you could be coding C/C++ programs for OS/390 or any flavor of UNIX and may never even come close to dealing with a GUI implementation. Especially if you work at a large software company you might ONLY be responsible for the backend logic and another team might design a user friendly front-end. Or maybe it's a web app being designed and you're only responsible for the D/B interfaces etc. This is the kind of narrow viewpoint that you mentioned some people have, and it's rather silly and dangerous for a college to be so severely limited in it's outlook. Unfortunately it seems most other vendors have left the educational market to MS so the colleges take the path of least resistance and go MS through and through.
Here in Canada colleges teach more practical skills, universities typically get into the more in-depth technical and theoretical aspects of things. For instance a few people I know that went in for COMPSCI at University wrote compilers from scratch as a class project, this is a much deeper level than you would get into at college. Which is not a problem as long as the college grad is the grunt-level programmer and not the high-level application architect or senior developer armed only with what is taught at college level here.
As an aside, the college could have saved themselves thousands of dollars in software and upgrade costs by going with a free software implementation. Perhaps then they could have actually given this guy a raise which would have meant not having to listen to him complain about being underpaid every damned class.
The funny thing was that I was pushing Linux and open-source software and he was bashing it. That is until he actually had to install Corel Linux on a machine (can't remember the reason) and he (not too happily) had to admit that it was extremely easy to install and configure when he did it. He was also blown away by it's ease of use and all the applications available for it (thanks GIMP, KDE and Gnome, XFree teams among others!) I just had to laugh because I'd like to think that as a programming instructor (especially a C++ instructor, which most of the KDE & Gnome apps are written in) he wouldn't dismiss this stuff without even looking at it, but that's exactly what he did. I mean, this allows you to actually see how the GUI is built not only the API's to it that the vendor bothers to make public! Every last stinkin line of code is there from end to end, the OS, the OS API's, the GUI code & API's, and the app coding itself as well as whatever API's it might make available to extend the functionality of the app. Hell, you can even get the code to the debugger!
It might be information overload for the beginner, but there's a lot of examples of good programming and knowledge to reap, for the price of free beer. I honestly don't know how you could ask for more. To not even be looking at open source software is a wasted opportunity on the college's part if you ask me.
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Slán leat agus go n'eirí an bóthar leat
I am 15 years old, and I live in Israel. I am the only person in my class who has any UNIX time whatsoever. I don't think that there are more than 5 people (out of 300!) studying with me in the same age group that would know how to do even the basic tasks on a Linux box. Most of them handle Windoze quite properly, though.
Many of these people are tied to Windows, because Linux lacks good Hebrew support. However, some of them do some programming and don't need Hebrew that badly. Unfortunately, they choose MSVC and VB. What's wrong with gtk+, QT, Pike or Perl? Nothing. However there's no good way to learn Linux programming. There are good books and informative manpages, but they speak only to those who already have some experience, and those who are willing to learn. There is nowhere to be taught Linux.
There has to be much more effort invested in teaching Linux. We can enjoy ourselves being 31337. However Linux will become a major player only when it is adopted by mainstream audience
Gcc on UNIX kicked Borland's ass in the compiler department. I got about a tenth of the compiler problem reports that the other TA's did. It also had slightly more predictable descriptions of compile errors, although that's not saying much... We used Jed for our editor, and it got rave reviews from almost everyone. It did color syntax highlighting, emulated other editors people already knew, and could be used either via keyboard shortcuts or menues. The debugger was DDD over GDB, and that was ok. It really did shine in the pointers part of the course, because the way it shows variables allowed people to actually see their data structure. That was invaluable! So basically, the tools were very good.
Now for the down side: It took a lot of time to get people used to the enviroment. Since this is a class open to any student, a lot of people didn't know what a command line was. Directories (as opposed to folders) were lost on them, etc. Since I refuse to teach by pure rote, I had to explain quite a lot of UNIX lore in the first lab session to get them all up and running. Lastly, we needed a graphics tookit for the last project in the class. We chose gtk+, since it was procedural and I had used it before. I'm not sure why it didn't go over well, but it didn't. The students had far more trouble with it than they did with the borland toolkit used on the windows side.
At the end of the class, we had the students rate the tools they used on a 1-10 scale. Here are the averaged results from both classes:
Solaris: 5
gcc: 7
Jed: 9.5 - Wow!
ddd: 7
gtk+: 2 - Ouch!
Windows: 6
Borland C++ compiler: 3 - Ouch!
Borland Editor: 4
Borland Debugger: 3 - Double ouch!
Borland GUI Toolkit: 4
Obviously, this isn't very scientific. I wan't involved with the windows classes, so I don't know what the issues with Borland were, but it's clear the students didn't much like it. I would be very interested in how KDevelop, CodeWarior, and MS-VC++ would fare.
During the class, 7 out of 30 people asked me to help them install LINUX (which was never mentioned during the class). I helped eveyone who had an Intel machine, and passed the rest off to a LinuxPPC expert. I don't think near as many people would have installled LINUX had I been activly evangelical.
It should be the other way around. Students should be taught on Win32 machines as well as UNIX machines.
- I don't care if they globalize against free speech. All my best free thoughts are done in my head.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Quite recently the Education Department of Western Australia (whom I work for) entered into a license deal with Microsoft. The Ed Dept was sick of trying to keep track of all the paper for Windows and Office licenses, so they asked Microsoft if they could simply buy a 'State License' and get a blanket aggreement that would cover every school in the state for as many copies as they would need. Microsoft seemed quite keen on the idea and an aggreement was signed. Basically, all the schools get a sorta "Select" kit that contains all of MS's desktop OSes, a couple of versions of Office, Encarta and VISUAL STUDIO PRO, amongst other things. The argument then becomes "Why not use Microsoft dev tools? It's not going to cost us anything anyway, the department has a state license."
-- If it's stupid but works, it isn't stupid.
Now, in the automobile market, the inherent costs of the product slowed the speed of market penetration, allowing regional brands to develop. In the computer software market the speed of market penetration has tended to suppress the development of alternate brands (but not completely). But the products are usually mass market.
I view the Microsoft development tools in the same way - lots of flashy marketing hype, some admittedly good things, but there are many other packages that provide equal or better options. I do not compare Microsoft to a Mercedes or a Jaguar, or even a Volvo. It's a Fnord or Chevy.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
My son discovered the DOS command prompt a while back, and taught himself to write .bat files, which are great for playing tricks on mom or customizing logout messages for the grandparents. That was a great intro to the whole directory structure behind Windows, and it was not long from there to Partition Magic and his first Linux distro. This amazing young man reads all the Linux mags we can find, and is now talking about building a Linux screamer for cheap. Age = 11.
Python is great. I found it while looking for a modern day version of Logo, introduced him to it, and away he went. (Yes, I know Logo still exists in more modern form, but the educational system support for it is no longer there, nor is it easy or cheap to find.)
Since NO ONE in his school was providing any help, we reached out to our local PC Users Group as well as to the SLUG on the local University campus. Both groups have been terrific, but the SLUG guys (almost all are guys) have gone above and beyond. Check out any local installfest and I am sure you will find the same kind of enthusiasm when they recognize a junior "one of their own" in your proto-programmer.
By the way, I picked up a copy of Compton Learning's Programming Made Easy, which purports to teach something called "Truck", Basic, C, and Java. Don't waste a penny on it. Beyond Truck, it is mostly multiple choice questions about what various bits of the language would look like. It does a bit of introduction to basic concepts, and not much beyond. It will turn off most kids in about five minutes. (It is aimed at ages 16 and up. I am "up", and it is sure not aimed at me.)
I have an idea. Let's start a revolution. Have each LUG adopt a local school. Have people gather up basement doorstoppers (say, old 486s), sponsor an installfest (have a ready source of old spare parts, and teach anyone interested (students, parents, teachers) how to get started in Linux. (A network card and connection will get around the old peripherals problem. Or use one of the tiny Linux distributions.) And/or do the same thing for Python. Agree to provide support. Meet one night a month in the school pc lab. There are bound to be a handful of kids who would be interested, in any school, and some of their parents. This could be done for little more than the investment of time. Let the wild rumpus begin!
First off, it doesn't surprise me to have the article held up in an anti-microsoft light. The slant that anything involving MS gets around here never ceases to amaze me.
Anyway, I've long contended that letting Apple take over our schools has been a VERY bad idea - let's be real - 90% of the kids that grow up to work with a computer WILL be using MS products. That's just a fact. So what's the point in training the on an Apple? Or Linux for that matter? At least if MS is involved, in all likely hood they are gaining useful skills.
I can't WAIT for the anti-microsoft replies to this one...
The Game Guy
Well my daughter (6yrs old) is no geek :( she doesn't run freeBSD for a start ;o)
However she does run SuSE linux as her main OS (She also has BeOS, and Win95 for her Authur and Fireman Sam CDROMs). She hasn't expressed any interest in programming, but she does enjoy KDE's range of games - particularly Shisen-sho, SameGame, Sokoban and KPoker.
Back on topic: As well as debian-jr and SuSE's educational emphasis, there are projects such as www.seul.org.
Residents of the UK should watch their local Linux news sites for a schools Linux project which will be launching soon....
- Derwen
http://fsfeurope.org/
And if they think that learning to operate a vendor-specific IDE that will be obsolete in two years represents those skills they are either not very mature or not very smart.
UNIX jobs pay just fine, and there are lots of them out there.
But perhaps more importantly, in my experience, companies prefer people with a UNIX background even for Windows NT jobs. The reason is that when the going gets tough, NT is really much more like UNIX than like the GUI-based auto-magic system it pretends to be. Even though most of our users run Windows, almost everybody on our staff has a good grasp of UNIX, and most of them are running UNIX themselves on some machine.
It's really much like the old line "give someone a fish and you feed them for a day, give them a fishing rod and you'll feed them forever". NT and its color-by-the-numbers approach is giving someone a fish, but to really be able to survive in the long term, people need deeper skills.
I can understand people who think Windows is easier to use than Unix/Linux---I don't agree, but I understand their confusion.
What I don't understand is people who claim that programming under Windows is easier. It just plain isn't true. There are so many "technologies" and "strategies" that you never know how X accesses Y this month. The environment is so unstable and unpredictable that you need a vast array of "test machines" ready to take a clean image so you can figure out if the problem is your program or the underlying (supposedly abstract) operating system. The tools are so feeble (or so localized) that they are virtually useless for any generalized task. I could go on.
Suffice it to say that I got a CS degree in the early 90's from a school that was smart enough to have a lab full of Sparcs. After school I did Windows programming and, having forgotten the "it just works" atmosphere of school, thought that unexplained crashes and hourly reboots were just par for the course. Now I've been programming on Linux exclusively for a full year and it's been heaven. Months go by before I boot my desktop...the servers rarely if ever get rebooted. The "API" is stable, simple and well-documented. It's easy!
--
MailOne
Non-meta-modded "Overrated" mods are killing Slashdot
(Hey Ryan! Here's your proof!)
- Unix is hard to start programming, due to lack of IDEs, learning resources, and classes. comment: actually, all those things are available, but they are not well promoted or accessible to young people without lots of free cash.
- Microsoft isn't doing anything wrong. They should be commended for teaching programming. comment: I suppose you could say the same about Mormon missionaries, Wycliffe Bible translators, or Communist revolutionaries using their resources to teach writing to peasants. They indoctrinate. In order to get what you need (literacy), you need to accept the ideology being taught. I'll concede that *I'm a Linux partisan* and would use indoctrination to push for free software, so I'm not pure. The point is that we need to recognize MS's goals with this program are motivated primarily by profit and market share, and can have an impact on open source and free software.
- Programming is not just doing VB. There's this great language XXXXXX which teaches concepts better. comment: Concepts are vital, but nearly all programming jobs, programming tasks, and even programming goals like getting widespread acceptance by people, are dependent on a platform. Most people, myself included, are motivated as much by successful deployment and project longevity as much as by the art of writing code. I'd argue that the majority of working programmers are in it for the money, and will do whatever it takes to make the paycheck.
- They teach VB and C++ at my school. I use Linux, but almost nobody else does. They make fun of me.
- I have no money, my school doesn't have computer science, so I used Linux because it is cheap, and I'm teaching myself. comment: I'm surprised, by what posts here indicate, that so many schools have good CS programming courses. I'm assuming that many kids here are going to pretty good schools, because the schools I've come across barely have anything going, and some rely on tech access centers.
- I started out on MS stuff, but got religion after I installed Linux and started programming on it. comment: kinda makes you wonder why people don't *start* on Linux
Ideas/MemesThere is a need for a network of "getting started" resources, and a need for a way to get this information in something that teachers can use. Some schools support programming in MS or Borland. Generally, advanced programming is not taught outside the context of writing things for a GUI.
There is a need for IDEs and information on getting IDEs. Unfortunately once you get used to Makefiles and build scripts, you start to drift from using an IDE, and the IDE market languishes. Also, there's no common IDE and debugging system for scripting languages, and that's an impediment to competing with VB.
There seems to be two clear perspectives: one says that programming is an intellectual exercise, the other says that you need to teach sellable skills. This former attitude reflected in the multitude of "teaching" programming environments out there. Most people on /., though, seem to have started out on real dev tools (or at least QBasic, which is pretty real), and have basically used the practical tools like C, VC++, VB, python, and perl. I think the real-world tools win out, because you really end up writing a *lot* of code to write tools for yourself. Perhaps the "teaching" should be performed in the framework of a real tool. I'm thinking of tools like email filters, web page screen scraping, image processing apps, Javascript in a browser, scripting video editing tools, etc. (BTW - I mean this is for high school students, not college students. The assumption is that most of the students will not pursue computer science, and probably won't become professional programmers.)
These are just a few ideas. If you're reading them, thanks. If you're pissed off at me, sorry, and sorry you feel that way. If you take the ideas seriously, please consider making them part of your worldview. Personally, I don't have the time to work on any of these projects this year, but I'm up for helping out if someone is inspired by this discussion to make an educational project happen.
John Kawakami, johnk _ cyberjava _ com
Of course, it's also good to get the notion of what, as a programmer, you should write because it's the Right Way even if the Wrong Way would also work fine (for now). But there's a time for both -- you must follow the Wrong Way if you are to understand why the Right Way is Right.
And then there's the question of whether there is anything such as OS-independant. Sure, there's mini-OSes that create one OS layer ontop of an OS (Java, JavaScript, Squeak -- and even HTML and HTTP are an OS of sorts). And then there's lowest common denominator -- usually connected with the former, so you determine how many holes you'll fill in for the host OS, and how many things you'll just leave out. But you still aren't OS independant -- you can't be -- you've just generalized your program across a certain layer abstract layer which itself is an OS.
Truly novel OS notions -- like the resource fork on Macs -- just can't be used in a portable fashion. And if they aren't used, you aren't really creating a program that fits with the OS, you are just doing lowest-common-denominator. Will your Tk programm work well in a OS that provides orthogonal persistance? Will it run on a mainframe? Distributed? Probably not... when there's only a few OSes that are all more similar than not, portability isn't that hard. But it also isn't a very important achievement.
Based on who's criteria? Windows? Every time I've installed or upgraded Windows on a Compaq machine, I've not had problems,
Based on mine, since the bad old days when MSDOS 3.3 was the latest and greatest. It works with windows because there are a bunch of drivers that have code added specifically to handle Compaq (and gloss over the incompatabilities). Even partitioning a hard drive is different on some Compaq systems (don't forget to allow for the 10 Meg 'special' partition on the primary drive etc).
It is worth noting that the differences are not necessarily bad things, just that they do compromise compatability in the process of adding their benefits.
1.The 'low cost motherboard' route is for the Linux enthusiast, which is fine. I've done the same. It's not for the "domain expert/casual computer user" who sees the computer as a means to an end, not an end unto itself. What's fine for you and me in this catagory is not even worth considering for a quite large (and important) group of people.
The casual user should probably just buy a pre-configured system with OS installed from a Linux enthusiast. (If they want Linux). In other words, tell me what you want, and let me worry about driver and other issues. I do that all the time.
2.What version of Debian? If it's based on versions from 12 months ago, I went through two distributions, Debian and Corel, trying to install it on a Gateway PentiumIII 450 (E5500, I believe). Once again, the installed Windows NT 4 worked just fine. Once again, I had problems with the video card and the network card.
Potato. By no problems, I mean just do the install by rote and it comes right up, no special instructions.
I felt that test10 was reasonably stable and close to being usable by mere mortals such as myself. That meant that stuff working reasonably well in the 2.2 kernel series would continue to work in the late 2.4 test series. I should have realized that it's probably another false hope, like the announcements in April and May. I stand corrected.
Once again, major Linux houses were asked to install internally and TEST. That's how unknown issues are discovered. Nowhere did he say 'here it is, ready for the masses, I guarantee that things working in 2.2 all continue to work'. He DID say "We've already found a few things that way, and hopefully, a month of this will shake out the worst.". It hasn't been a month yet, and a bum NIC driver is not even the worst.
Again, the comment concerning money saved is based on what studies, what public statistics to back this up?
Simple figure, public information. The pricetag on Windows vs. the price tag on Linux. I don't even have to start counting other costs like license compliance auditing to see that it'll add up significantly for a school. As for hiring an idiot admin, that's not a real factor since it's true across the board. If we presume they've had the sense to hire or contract a good admin, the ability to fix up a Linux box remotely is a big cost saver. It is even possable to do a full Linux upgrade remotely (with a little care).
Over the past few decades, Microsoft and others have published rack after rack of information on operating system and application internals. Yes, there have been authors such as Andrew Schulman (Unauthorized Windows 95, etc) who've made a cottage industry out of documenting those dark corners that Microsoft 'forgot', but the system has been heavily documented based on customer feedback and need.
Meanwhile, Linux exposes every last dark corner intrinsically at no cost (those Windows books aren't cheap). Since the source is provided, you can change literally anything at all, re-compile and see how it affects the system. Until MS publishes their source code for free, Windows can't begin to compare with the openness of Linux.
Windows, they can get an educational discount on the Borland Standard version and teach that portion of Windows.
And yet, it'll still cost more for a single user license than the same tools for Linux plus a full source license with unlimited distribution rights.
Two weeks ago I found a very good bargain on another Compaq; this one, a Presario 5000 with an Athlon 900MHz (Socket A), Hercules 3D Prophet II with Nvidia's GeForce2 MX chipset, 30Gig HD, 256MB ram, etc, etc, etc.
For many years, Compaq has been one of the least compatable 'PC compatables' on the market. Some of their models do run Linux just fine. I regularly buy low cost motherboards from Taiwan with built-in everything and get Debian up and running in no time. The only thing that doesn't work is the 'winmodem' (the name should be a clue). That would work too (as well as a winmodem ever works anyway) but for patent issues in the U.S. the performance is the same as a Compaq or better, the price is lower, and compatibility issues are non-existant.
and when I've tried to test the 2.4.0-test10 kernel, I loose the network card
The word test isn't there because it looks cool, it means 'TEST', not 'ready to go out of the box'. Unless you want to TEST, don't use a test kernel.
A school that just wants to plug in and go should buy their machines pre-configured and tested. If they choose a Linux based machine, they stand to save a lot of money. If the goal is to really teach kids about computers inside and out, they'll need one where looking inside is encouraged, not one that tries it's best to keep the hidden parts a secret. Imagine an auto mechanics course where the cars all have their hoods welded shut.
I believe that a truly dedicated kid, one who enjoys programming, will devour (or at least try) every new development environment they come across. A kid who's really interested in coding is not going to say "man, this linux thing is icky" if they got broken in with VB or Visual Studio.
However, from a practical/school system point of view, the nice thing about Microsoft development environments is that they install well onto those PCs from Dell that are shared between the C class, the BASIC class, and the word processing class. Dual booting is always an option, I guess, but try telling a overworked schoolteacher that they have to go through a 2-operating-system installation ordeal every time somebody infects a machine with a virus or hoses it some other way.
I'm teaching my nephew (aged 8) to program in Python. I selected it because it's got a fairly shallow learning curve (you can get impressive results almost as soon as you start), it's a 'real' programming language (lists, maps, objects etc) and it's got elements from most of the major language families (structured, OO, functional - but not really declarative).
He is picking it up amazingly fast, and loving every minute. I am having a lot of fun, too.
I am sure other languages would be appropriate too, but from personal experience I can say that Python seems to be an ideal 'first' language.
Incidentally, his PC runs Win95, so I've given him the Gnu tools. He think's they're funny, but he is already having a load of fun doing simple text processing with the 'usual suspects' (cat, sort, uniq, grep etc) I think this gives him the best of both worlds.
I'll get him using Emacs before he's 9...
I have a 7 yr old that I would like to bring beyond the gaming stage. I started learning basic myself (the book "Basic Basic" on my PCjr at age 13. Of course that screwed me for other languages later no. That's probably why I'm not a programmer, that and I don't want to be one.
Anyway, what would be a good language to feed my 7 yr old son? Is python too advanced? I seem to remember Logo.. is it still around?
I don't think that a seven year old want's to use a linux disto because of the simple fact that they can't play much games on them
"Games" are a distraction. The computer IS the game. You learn by playing with it, first from the outside, then by writing simple programs, then by tearing into the code to see how it works, then by modifying the code to see if you can make it better, cleaner, or more capable.
Try THAT with windows! You hit a wall. With linux it's all there as you get to each step.
It's not convenient for professionalls - there's a learning curve. But children are little learning engines, with all the time in the world.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Far more important than Unix vs. Windows is commercial vs. non-commercial. Are these kids going to be stuck on MS developer mailing lists for life? Are they going to be constantly told how much better the tools they are using than those of MS's competitors, (or those of the FSF)? What's going to be the long-term effect on these kids? Is this education or advertising?
Free Hans!
The first few months were the worst, I was bitching all the time about the fact that the teachers didn't know shit, that they were teaching us stupid Microsoft stuff (VBscript instead of JavaScript, MS OSI Model, etc). I got really pissed.
One day, I realized that I wasn't learning anything and that I had to get my degree. To make my experience at that #@$#%!@ school enjoyable, I decided to start teaching Linux. And that's exactly what I did. I teach Linux for FREE, I have a server where students have an account.
It's every saturday afternoon. Today I am teaching apache.
Linux classes
Apache for today
Looking for a great online backup: Green Backup
Shouldn't that be Malfunction??
--Clay
The reason for that is because m$-windowses were designed starting from the wrong end, the GUI. Also it was an evolution from single-user, single-task MS-DOS. Then, in NT, they tried to glue a VMS kernel to that GUI, making a total mess of it. The result is that the simplest tasks, like, for instance, making an animated sequence displaying the result of some calculation, results in a huge and cumbersome thing, needing multi-thread programming, etc.
Compare that to Unix, where the system grew up from the kernel. To do the animation I mentioned above, you can write two separate programs, one for the calculations and another for drawing the results and use a pipe for process-to-process communication.
Yes, I know, there *are* pipes in m$-windowses, too. Just don't try to find any mention of them in the documentation. For instance, "Programming Windows with MFC" by Jeff Prosise, Microsoft Press second edition, 1999. If it's not in a 1327 page book, published by Microsoft itself, where can I find out how to use unnamed pipes in w2k, NT, or windoze95/98? The blurb says "The premier resource for object-oriented programming on 32-bit Windows platforms" on the front cover and "...the definitive exposition of Microsoft's powerful C++ class library..." in the back cover. Ironically, the answer for this documentation problem is... read the source. MFC comes with source code, or, at least it came in the last version I bought. In the end, if you want to do any programing beyond what VB can do, be prepared to spend long hours browsing what must be the most confusing GUI toolkit since OWL.
Or you can do what I did: migrate everything to Unix. If you program in a corporate environment there will be resistance to this, but I found the way to overcome it. I put together a Linux server running Oracle8i, a magic word that conquers corporate hearts and minds. Then I write my programs to allow clients to have web access. This way, we are all happy. I do all my development in Linux and they can use whatever desktop machine they want.
I'm in my second year of highschool now.
I've been to two schools because of reorganization.
In both schools I've tried to get some sort of unix education running. Both of the schools were completely Microsoft dependant.
So far, I've found a few challenging obstacles.
The school board doesn't want to train their existing tech teachers or hire new technology teachers to use any sorts of unix. They don't realize, in the long term, training staff to use unix would probably save them more then continuing to buy MS site licenses for each and every school. Really, they just haven't gotten into this whole *nix thing, and I don't see them wanting to. It's more work for them. It's just easier to spend tax dollars than to learn something new.
In my first year, I managed to get one debian box running. sshd, apache, whatnot. This is where I actually got most of my linux clue. Most students weren't all that interested in sshing to a shell to poke around like they could in DOS. Some managed to get their ~/public_html directories running with a little help. The last few classes in my Computer Technology 3200 class I was permitted to hook up a projector and take the students through a quick linux trainer. They learned how to use pico and things. The school board said all along that they didn't "support" linux, and wouldn't give us any help or resources with the project. I came away from that school when it closed fairly satisfied.
This year, my highschool has *no* intention of using any sort of unix. The NT administrator doesn't have the time to learn how to use it and doesn't seem to want to.
They feel a linux box on their network would be a security risk. I'm not sure how they've come to this conclusion. I think they've got their facts backwards. A linbox on their network would only be a problem if a student got root, while on a windows 95 box you're free to do whatever you please.
" Control Panel.{21EC2020-3AEA-1069-A2DD-08002B30309D}" anyone?
Also worth pointing out, recently, the school had all the students participate in a chocolate-selling fundraiser to pay for Windows 2000 Advanced Server. M$'s site says it's $3,999 USD for Advanced server with 25 client access Licences. The highschool has over 150 workstations. That there is a _lot_ of money for an operating system. We're not even talking about the client OS. For the amount of money they're going to spend on Windows, I believe they could train staff to use a unix based operating system with KDE, or similar.
It's really sad that citizens don't realize millions of their tax dollars are being wasted on an operating system they could do better without.
-i
I have to disagree with your statement that windows programming is the only kind likely to "likely to provide a decent living". I am college students and in fact all of the jobs I have had (summer and term-time) have been in unix. The reason for this is that the number of companies needing web-based programs has exploded and I have had no trouble finding work programming perl under unix for applications that used the web for their interface. Not just small cgi's, but large application with a team of people working on them full time that just use the web (and email) for their interface. Granted, this does not require a great knowledge of unix system calls/networking, but I think it is a real error to say that unless you know how to program for windows, you will be unemployed.
Care about freedom?
I'd rather be lucky than good.
Even though its based on Microsoft software and such. It still might make persuade more kids into taking computer classes and heading into the computer industry at an early age.
Once they have gained a stable base, most will more then likely go out on their own looking for things that interest them. Not to mention, how could one be computer literate these days and not know life outside of Microsoft.
I believe getting programs like these iinto schools is a good thing, even if they are funded by Microsoft. They will help everyone as a whole. And at some point as more open source companies and products become mainstream, you will see schools open to more then just a few free licenses from Microsoft.
On a last note. I would tend to think most middle school and high school computer teachers have not had much open source exsposure in their lives, mostly general computer use and programming. Once those teachers retire and new teachers that have "grown up with/grown along with" open source products will attitudes change as to what is tought.
Okay, I'm definitely not a "Unix Zealot." I'm typing this in microsoft explorer for chrissakes. Having said that, I have to agree that Unix-like systems do have a natural appeal for programmers.
The main reason simply comes down to this: most programmers are the kind of people who just have to know what that funny looking button on the VCR remote does. They're tinkerers. That's usually how they got into programming in the first place (at least in my experience). Unix systems allow a lot of this, because damn near everything's in text files. There's just no end of stuff to play with. Windows, on the other hand, tends to hide everything in the registry.
The main advantages of windows are it's ease of installation/configuration and the availability of software. These are great for the mass market, but really offer a lot less appeal to the kind of person who is into programming. I enjoy fiddling around with a Linux install to get everything just right. If I were still seriously into programming, as the people we're talking about are, the software thing wouldn't bother me. It would just be a good excuse to mess with code.
Which brings me to another reason programmers like Linux and similar system - availability of source code. Just something more to tinker with.
(Of course, Linux doesn't HAVE to be that way. Mandrake has its flaws, but it sure makes life easier...)
"If God created us in his own image, we have more than reciprocated"
Apple did this long ago, with their campaign to put their Macintosh computers in all the schools. Their thinking was, let's get the kiddies used to the Mac during their growing up years and when they get older, they're be ours forever. Not a bad idea (if you recall, Hitler ran a similar campaign), but we all know how this turned out for the both of them.
We don't need to worry - unix has the "natural appeal" for aspiring programmers. And, with unix,they get all the necessary tools for free. This microsoft program might teach programming to someone who will never really be a good programmer - good programmers are "natural" (at least they have the "programmers drive"), and don't wait for school to teach them something they would learn much earlier if they just bothered to read some books.
This seems kinda desperate. Is microsoft really losing ALL the interest among developers?
Save your wrists today - switch to Dvorak
If you are programming in a modern programming language like Python or even JavaScript, with a portable GUI framework like Tk, Swing or Mozilla, it really sould not matter what operating system you are using.
Rather than promoting "Unix for schools" we should promote "platform-independent software development for schools." We should stress that if you focus on that which works across platforms you come to understand better the universal themes of computer science rather than the specifics of an OS.
Once the operating system becomes more or less irrelevant, schools will of their own volition choose the operating system that is cheaper, more secure, easier to maintain programatically and so forth.
Paul Prescod
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