On 3/24/06, Eli Billauer <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Ohad Lutzky wrote: > > >This > >week I gave my VIM lecture, and Taub 3 was quite literally packed with > >Matam students. > > > Ah, it sounds like a smash hit! I take my hat off (not the red one ;). > > So let me ask this: What made this success? What's the secret? Was the > lecture announced in the course? > > Maybe we're on to something here: If a lecture in some UNIX related > issue manages to fill a class, and two of those participants discover > Haifux, then something like three-four such lectures per year can keep > the the blood streaming. That's my simple math.
Pretty much a paraphrasing of my own post :) Yes, the lecture was announced in the course, and that is definetely what made it so popular. > So Ohad, I suppose that the VIM lecture will be running next semester as > well, and the next, and the next... ;) Guess so, as long as I manage to keep my grades high and green uniform tucked neatly in my closed :) > But what can we learn from this? How can we pack Taub 3 with eager CS > students again? What do they want, that we can easily give? I know that for Matam (and this extends to Data Structures), the answer is "programming comfortably in a Unix environment". In the Matam course, Makefiles are barely mentioned. No text editor is taught properly. sed and awk, being disallowed in the CShell exercise, are not taught. Shell scripting is taught as a generic means for parsing text, and its true power is not shown. And its true power is quite necessary in the course - generating large, random testfiles for our programs for instance. For Operating Systems, well, I guess our resident kernel hackers can answer that... -- To necessity... and beyond! Ohad Lutzky
