[Haifux] My "Stop Using (and Teaching) C-Shell and Tcsh" Page

[Orr Dunkelman]

On 10/10/07, Shlomi Fish <shlomif at iglu.org.il> wrote:
>
>
> Hmmmppp... people keep telling me that they want to see "Pro-X" instead
> of "Anti-Y". But sometimes criticising something as bad is a good idea.
> I'm
> tired of people teaching C-shell and abusing it, and that's what this page
> is
> about.


Now that I live in Europe, I'm tired of people who think that Israel is the
source of all evil. Still if I will explain to them that I'm against arabs
this will be less effective than explaining to them that Israel is not that
bad.
(btw, I don't think that the arabs are evil, it's just an example). This
example is taken to the extreme just to make argumentative claim, and not to
be taken in any case as my point of view on the conflict.


> A) it might be a bad couple
> > of students (you know, the fact that you are a Technion student does not
> > transform you into a god)
>
> It does not. But these were two Technion students who made it into the
> EE "Intro to Operating Systems" course, and who studied in EE. So they
> weren't bad. I know it was a problem because I solved the same exercise
> while
> ignoring the case of directory names with whitespace.


There are also students who arrived to this situation by pure lack (this
thing might still happen from the statistical point of view). It might even
be that they had moment of weakness, where they forgot all about it.


> B) they might be student without any background
> > in tcsh (let's say two guys from chemistry had to tweak such a script)
>
> They studied tcsh in Mamat, I'm sure of that.


Well, do you know how well they studied it back then?
How long it was since they've studied it? If they took the course three
years afters without reading the material from the past?


> > C)
> > they are far from being a statistical majority (As most of the students
> in
> > the Technion succeed in using tcsh).
>
> Yes, while ignoring such cases as whitespace in filenames.


And showing that they are capble of understanding the fact that there are
the things the client says he wants, and the things he really wants.

As I said, I once solved a perl problem (by people who just finished course
where they used perl for the same job, and I can attest are very
professional and smart) by tcsh script. This still does not make it a valid
argument for tcsh over perl.

Orr.
-- 
Orr Dunkelman,
Orr.Dunkelman at gmail.com

"Any human thing supposed to be complete, must for that reason infallibly
be faulty" -- Herman Melville, Moby Dick.

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