Re: tlug: Re: Linux taking over the globe?

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <turnbull@example.com>]

>>>>> "Karl-Max" == Karl-Max Wagner <karlmax@example.com> writes:

    >> > If students are unable to learn to use Linux, they are also
    >> > unfit for taking courses at a university. In other words, they

"Unable" = "unfit" is a pretty good approximation.  Close enough to
score a soccer goal, anyway.  "Unwilling" = "unfit" is just not on the
same planet.

    >> > have nothing lost there and should be relegated to work they
    >> > are fit for, e.g. sweeping streets.

    >> Should students really learn to use Linux, as long as they use
    >> computers just as a tool for wordprocessing and calculating? 
    >> Somewhere in the bibel a society is compared to

    Karl-Max> Absolutely. If they do any serious use of computers for
    Karl-Max> that they will sooner or later have to write some sort
    Karl-Max> of programs to do some tasks. That should be easy and
    Karl-Max> not requiring professional programmer skills, on the
    Karl-Max> other hand offer professional power. So what ? Under

Word and Excel have macro languages.  Some pretty well-paid
"programmers" know nothing else.

If you know Emacs LISP, you can program for almost any platform.
Ditto Perl, although I hate to admit it ;-)

In the end, "learning Linux" has nothing to do with this.  You don't
have to learn Linux to use it anymore; TurboLinux has proved that.

The benefits of learning Linux are not a prerequisite for living and
working in a technical society.

    Karl-Max> Linux they have dozens of programming systems to suit
    Karl-Max> their needs, scripting languages, all sorts of HLL's
    Karl-Max> etc. - and all that for free ! It is difficult to do the
    Karl-Max> same under Windows, and impossible for the same

Bullshit.  Anything that can be built with GCC on Linux can be built
with DJGPP on DOS, except for stuff that #include's <linux/...>
stuff.  And by using RSXNT, you can build lots of stuff on Windows
that can't be built on Linux (well, lots of RSXNT developers _build_
on Linux, but of course you mostly can't use it on Linux given the
state of WinE).

As for "difficult," mostly it has already been done.  Download the
.zip from www.SimTel.org and install.

    Karl-Max> price. Price is important for a university - instead of
    Karl-Max> wasting big bucks on M$ crap it is better to pump the
    Karl-Max> big bucks in improving research and teaching.

Free software is free, and the first big decision most Linux users
have to make is whether to wipe that other "free" OS off their box,
the one that the Microsoft license requires to be installed into every 
box whether it will be used or not.  It is possible (from the point of 
view of learning languages) to make a DOS box look just like Linux,
right down to the bash command line interface.  Or tcsh, or zsh, if
that's how how you get your kshicks.

The benefits of using a real OS are not in the user interface; they're 
in efficient implementation of pipes as buffers rather than temp
files, real multiuser, multitasking processes, a network-oriented GUI, 
etc, etc.

    Karl-Max> In other words: Learning Linux NOW is a good investment
    Karl-Max> into the future - the times are at hand when Windows
    Karl-Max> will be a case for historians only an unixoid OS's are
    Karl-Max> mainstream. And in the end it save time and money. So
    Karl-Max> the initial learning effort is well spent.

What's Un*xoid?  NT is more or less POSIX-compliant, I believe.  Nor
is it going to go away soon.

Really what it comes down to, as far as I can tell, is that you think
everybody should know a modicum of shell programming.  And that is not 
possible to learn on NT (well, I haven't tried 4NT, the shareware
command processor for NT and Win32; if it does for NT what 4DOS does
for DOS, it's ugly and deserving of a famous "Warning: 4NT Programming 
Considered Harmful" article, but far far better than nothing), because 
the important uses of shell scripts are administrative wrappers and
cooperative glue between apps, and NT insists on a very clumsy GUI for 
the former and OLE for the latter.

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