Is there a single Linux (or Unix) user without some knowledge of bash?
So what? Users with "some knowledge" won't ever use these fancy new Bash 4.0 features. They don't even know how to use more basic stuff, like pipes and filters.
Most serious scripts are (and continue to be) written using/bin/sh. Maybe your definition of serious is something different?
Scripts written in a serious language. Maybe you've been using sh so long, it's more efficient for you to work in it than in any more modern language. (Rather like an old Bell Labs hand I used to know who could edit faster in ed than any of us could in vi or emacs.) But the traditional shell language is still very klunky and limited compared to later scripting languages.
I still write the odd shell script myself. But if I need to do anything at all complicated, I switch to Perl. And even Perl is showing its age. (If writing scripts were a bigger part of my job, I'd learn Ruby.) But it's still more sophisticated than sh, bash, or csh.
I believe you're the kind of person I was referring to when I said "tons of fun for a certain kind of hacker." But tell me, is this latest update to Bash going to have any sort of impact on your productivity? Or is it just more kewl stuff that you'll enjoy playing with?
That's exactly my attitude. Everybody who responded to my post seems to read it to mean "shell scripts are obsolete." You all missed the part where I said that shell scripts still have their uses. They just don't have enough uses for anybody to care about an overhaul of any shell language.
I did say that shell scripts still had their uses. But does that make new shell features worth caring about? Will any of them find their way in the boot scripts?
Tons of fun for a certain kind of hacker, but not of any interest for people writing serious scripts. Shell scripting was a big breakthrough 30 years ago, and it still has its uses. But the scripting community has moved on, and doesn't really care that Bash or Csh now have features that other scripting languages acquired decades ago.
They are unable to write a correct severance package. In my entire career, I have never has an experience like this.
I have.
Even though they have tons of cash in the bank, they risk bad publicity to get the overpayment back
Why do people keep assuming that corporations have free will? No officer of a publicly held company is in a position to say "oh well, it's only $1 million, we have $50 billion in the bank, no big deal."
Hate to spoil a perfectly good joke, but Bright did not invent or name C++. Credit for that belongs to Bjarne Stroustrup.
Bright did create some widely used C++ compilers. But to me he will always be the author of that notorious time sink, Empire. If you count derived games like Civilization (which is just Empire with a complicated resource model) Bright has single-handedly destroyed more productivity than Pac Man and Warcraft combined!
I will again disagree with the notion that your typical undergrad has the knowledge required to produce quality products.
Never said they did. That was something you read into my argument.
Actually, the whole issue is not really an issue. The argument started when the person who began this thread thought we should be all impressed by the field of technical communication because some of its practitioners have "post-graduate" educations. When I expressed a contrary opinion, he took it personally, because he is a member of this "post graduate" elite.
I took this to mean he had gone to grad school and went for a masters or even a PhD. But no, when he finally explained himself, his "post-graduate" degree was just a certificate program. His final project: write a user manual for a web browser.
Now, this is perfectly fine accomplishment, and something I'd look positively on if I saw it on somebody's resume. But writing a simple user manual is not, by any stretch of the imagination, "post graduate" work. Calling it that is silly hype.
So now we've wasted all this time refuting each others arguments, and all the while nobody even understood what the other was arguing. A good, uhm, argument for not hanging around on Slashdot!
That is, an undergrad IS poor training, most of the time.
Agreed. But we're not talking about a typical undergrad education, we're talking about the education of a tech writer. The tech writer can attend a school that has appropriate coursework, or he can take the coursework after he graduates. Either way, the coursework is undergrad-level stuff. You don't need to go to grad school to learn about font readability.
Oops, I just realized I read your post carelessly. I assumed that you were talking about somebody who'd studied technical communication in college, and you were talking about a random English major.
I stand by the other things I said though. The special skills you need to be a technical writer are not that hard to learn. You can learn them by taking technical communications courses as an undergrad, by doing them later (usually in a certificate program) or even on the job. Anybody who went to grad school just to learn them is getting graduate credit for undergrad work.
But I would not expect an undergrad to be well-versed in the nature of which fonts improve readability for people with learning disabilities, best practices of manual writing, special necessities of localization, and other things of that nature.
Why not? None of the topics you mention is rocket science. Yes, many tech writers are woefully ignorant of these topics, but that's because they're badly trained, not because the subject was too advanced for them.
Your aversion to the word "theory" betrays a certain hatred toward academic study that is not well informed on the subject.
Spare me the armchair psychology. Theory has its uses. I've often worked with brilliant computer scientists who've forgotten more theory than I'll ever learn: algorithmics, combinatorics, concurrency. These people do kewl stuff that I often envy. But when it comes to practical user documentation, the academic approach to writing gets in the way. Academic people write for other academic people, not for users.
(One thing they do do well is criticize my work. And I encourage them to do so, it makes me a better writer. But that entails spotting misleading language or errors and omissions of fact. When they try to do my job for me and dictate the exact words, I push back. This often raises hackles, but these lower again when people realize that I'm making difficult topics accessible to ordinary people.)
Anyway, you seem to be defining "theory" a lot more broadly than I would. Simple rules about when to use serif fonts and how to make a document easy to localize are not "theory" by any definition I would use.
I'm not sore at all. I tried to express a difference of opinion, which apparently you didn't care to hear. Your privilege, but when you cuss me out and accuse me of being intemperate in the same post, you show a lack of mental coherence that does not bode well for your career as a tech writer.
Namely, those who study Tech Writing at the graduate level are expected to become knowledgeable about the theory involved in producing clear documentation.
And how is that different from what the novice tech writer is supposed to know? Unless your emphasis is on the word "theory", in which case you're describing precisely the attitude I don't like to see in the workplace. The best technical prose is simple and intuitive, and a good tech writer works in that mode. The kind of theorizing grad students are taught to do is the enemy of that.
Of course, I'm guilty of speaking theoretically myself, because I've never worked with anybody who had a PhD in Technical Communication. Possibly they all work at teaching tech writers, rather than doing actual tech writing!
Dude, you were the one making a big deal about the value of a "post graduate" degree. That generally means a degree awarded by a graduate school, not a certificate program. Any confusion here comes from your inflated terminology.
A program leading up to writing a user manual sounds like many of the first-rate programs I've run across. But these were all certificate or undergrad programs, and you identified this as a graduate program. I assume that means that you got a Master's for completing it? I'm sorry, but that sounds like degree inflation to me.
That doesn't mean that they didn't make a good writer out of you, but it does mean that your degree comes with more hocus pocus than it should If I were interviewing job candidates, I'd certainly consider such a degree a real qualification. But no more so than somebody who graduated from a program with less pretension. And maybe no more so than a lot of other academic degrees.
(One lady I work with has a Master's in Library Science, which she got with an eye to architecting content systems. She's a lot more useful to us than a whole posse of Technical Communication postgrads.)
And if somebody came with a PhD in Technical Communication, I'd positively resist hiring them. They'd be full of complicated theories that just make life difficult.
That's what I meant too. And I'm glad you've put so much effort into bettering yourself, but I just don't believe that the kind of skill you need to write technical documentation is honed by the kind of work you do in grad school. As I said before, the academic mindset trains you to write for a much different audience.
Slashdot Mirror
Is there a single Linux (or Unix) user without some knowledge of bash?
So what? Users with "some knowledge" won't ever use these fancy new Bash 4.0 features. They don't even know how to use more basic stuff, like pipes and filters.
You honestly think there are millions of people out there whose primary user interface is a shell command line? You need to get out more!
Most serious scripts are (and continue to be) written using /bin/sh. Maybe your definition of serious is something different?
Scripts written in a serious language. Maybe you've been using sh so long, it's more efficient for you to work in it than in any more modern language. (Rather like an old Bell Labs hand I used to know who could edit faster in ed than any of us could in vi or emacs.) But the traditional shell language is still very klunky and limited compared to later scripting languages.
I still write the odd shell script myself. But if I need to do anything at all complicated, I switch to Perl. And even Perl is showing its age. (If writing scripts were a bigger part of my job, I'd learn Ruby.) But it's still more sophisticated than sh, bash, or csh.
I believe you're the kind of person I was referring to when I said "tons of fun for a certain kind of hacker." But tell me, is this latest update to Bash going to have any sort of impact on your productivity? Or is it just more kewl stuff that you'll enjoy playing with?
That's exactly my attitude. Everybody who responded to my post seems to read it to mean "shell scripts are obsolete." You all missed the part where I said that shell scripts still have their uses. They just don't have enough uses for anybody to care about an overhaul of any shell language.
shell scripts are very easy to generate from repeated manual invocations of command lines.
Very simple shell scripts, which don't use any of these fancy new features. I'm still not hearing a reason I should care about a major update to Bash.
I did say that shell scripts still had their uses. But does that make new shell features worth caring about? Will any of them find their way in the boot scripts?
Tons of fun for a certain kind of hacker, but not of any interest for people writing serious scripts. Shell scripting was a big breakthrough 30 years ago, and it still has its uses. But the scripting community has moved on, and doesn't really care that Bash or Csh now have features that other scripting languages acquired decades ago.
Probably not possible without support from HTC. Which won't happen. Phone makers basically consider a phone and its OS a matched set.
They are unable to write a correct severance package. In my entire career, I have never has an experience like this.
I have.
Even though they have tons of cash in the bank, they risk bad publicity to get the overpayment back
Why do people keep assuming that corporations have free will? No officer of a publicly held company is in a position to say "oh well, it's only $1 million, we have $50 billion in the bank, no big deal."
Hate to spoil a perfectly good joke, but Bright did not invent or name C++. Credit for that belongs to Bjarne Stroustrup.
Bright did create some widely used C++ compilers. But to me he will always be the author of that notorious time sink, Empire. If you count derived games like Civilization (which is just Empire with a complicated resource model) Bright has single-handedly destroyed more productivity than Pac Man and Warcraft combined!
And of course a D implementation is available!
I will again disagree with the notion that your typical undergrad has the knowledge required to produce quality products.
Never said they did. That was something you read into my argument.
Actually, the whole issue is not really an issue. The argument started when the person who began this thread thought we should be all impressed by the field of technical communication because some of its practitioners have "post-graduate" educations. When I expressed a contrary opinion, he took it personally, because he is a member of this "post graduate" elite.
I took this to mean he had gone to grad school and went for a masters or even a PhD. But no, when he finally explained himself, his "post-graduate" degree was just a certificate program. His final project: write a user manual for a web browser.
Now, this is perfectly fine accomplishment, and something I'd look positively on if I saw it on somebody's resume. But writing a simple user manual is not, by any stretch of the imagination, "post graduate" work. Calling it that is silly hype.
So now we've wasted all this time refuting each others arguments, and all the while nobody even understood what the other was arguing. A good, uhm, argument for not hanging around on Slashdot!
That is, an undergrad IS poor training, most of the time.
Agreed. But we're not talking about a typical undergrad education, we're talking about the education of a tech writer. The tech writer can attend a school that has appropriate coursework, or he can take the coursework after he graduates. Either way, the coursework is undergrad-level stuff. You don't need to go to grad school to learn about font readability.
Don't be rude to India. Yeah, call center zombies with thick Hindi accents are a pain to deal with, but at least they know how to follow flow charts!
Oops, I just realized I read your post carelessly. I assumed that you were talking about somebody who'd studied technical communication in college, and you were talking about a random English major.
I stand by the other things I said though. The special skills you need to be a technical writer are not that hard to learn. You can learn them by taking technical communications courses as an undergrad, by doing them later (usually in a certificate program) or even on the job. Anybody who went to grad school just to learn them is getting graduate credit for undergrad work.
But I would not expect an undergrad to be well-versed in the nature of which fonts improve readability for people with learning disabilities, best practices of manual writing, special necessities of localization, and other things of that nature.
Why not? None of the topics you mention is rocket science. Yes, many tech writers are woefully ignorant of these topics, but that's because they're badly trained, not because the subject was too advanced for them.
Your aversion to the word "theory" betrays a certain hatred toward academic study that is not well informed on the subject.
Spare me the armchair psychology. Theory has its uses. I've often worked with brilliant computer scientists who've forgotten more theory than I'll ever learn: algorithmics, combinatorics, concurrency. These people do kewl stuff that I often envy. But when it comes to practical user documentation, the academic approach to writing gets in the way. Academic people write for other academic people, not for users.
(One thing they do do well is criticize my work. And I encourage them to do so, it makes me a better writer. But that entails spotting misleading language or errors and omissions of fact. When they try to do my job for me and dictate the exact words, I push back. This often raises hackles, but these lower again when people realize that I'm making difficult topics accessible to ordinary people.)
Anyway, you seem to be defining "theory" a lot more broadly than I would. Simple rules about when to use serif fonts and how to make a document easy to localize are not "theory" by any definition I would use.
I'm not sore at all. I tried to express a difference of opinion, which apparently you didn't care to hear. Your privilege, but when you cuss me out and accuse me of being intemperate in the same post, you show a lack of mental coherence that does not bode well for your career as a tech writer.
Post-graduate means "after graduation" and nothing more.
So if I graduate from college, and then take a course in welding, I've done post-graduate work? Please.
Namely, those who study Tech Writing at the graduate level are expected to become knowledgeable about the theory involved in producing clear documentation.
And how is that different from what the novice tech writer is supposed to know? Unless your emphasis is on the word "theory", in which case you're describing precisely the attitude I don't like to see in the workplace. The best technical prose is simple and intuitive, and a good tech writer works in that mode. The kind of theorizing grad students are taught to do is the enemy of that.
Of course, I'm guilty of speaking theoretically myself, because I've never worked with anybody who had a PhD in Technical Communication. Possibly they all work at teaching tech writers, rather than doing actual tech writing!
Dude, you were the one making a big deal about the value of a "post graduate" degree. That generally means a degree awarded by a graduate school, not a certificate program. Any confusion here comes from your inflated terminology.
If you see them as "so last century", it's because you let them get away with it last century!
Not me, I voted for Gore.
A program leading up to writing a user manual sounds like many of the first-rate programs I've run across. But these were all certificate or undergrad programs, and you identified this as a graduate program. I assume that means that you got a Master's for completing it? I'm sorry, but that sounds like degree inflation to me.
That doesn't mean that they didn't make a good writer out of you, but it does mean that your degree comes with more hocus pocus than it should If I were interviewing job candidates, I'd certainly consider such a degree a real qualification. But no more so than somebody who graduated from a program with less pretension. And maybe no more so than a lot of other academic degrees.
(One lady I work with has a Master's in Library Science, which she got with an eye to architecting content systems. She's a lot more useful to us than a whole posse of Technical Communication postgrads.)
And if somebody came with a PhD in Technical Communication, I'd positively resist hiring them. They'd be full of complicated theories that just make life difficult.
That's what I meant too. And I'm glad you've put so much effort into bettering yourself, but I just don't believe that the kind of skill you need to write technical documentation is honed by the kind of work you do in grad school. As I said before, the academic mindset trains you to write for a much different audience.
But that also includes malware that scams you in other way. "Download this program to bypass logins to porn sites!"
Mainly, he reserves the right to use apostrophes when he damn well pleases!