UNIX admin wrote:
[...]
Moinak, I urge you to think carefully one more time about what you've written
(an excellent reply BTW). The number of true IT experts and professionals is
dwindling exponentially every day. Over here I've got bakers and train drivers
and construction workers being hired into IT to write web applications based on
Oracle databases! I've got people working as Oracle DBAs on Solaris not knowing
how to set up a PATH variable properly! I've got people doing Oracle who don't
know how to use RMAN or RAC, let alone know what ZFS is, and that Solaris now
runs on the i86pc platform!
How many Jeff Bonwicks and Adam Leventhals and Moinak Goshes and Joerg
Schillings do you think are left in the world? And how many of them are outside
of that small concentrated spot called Menlo Park, CA?
Can we dumb things down? Why yes of course we can. Any good engineer can! But
what will happen when Jeff Bonwick retires? Or Moinak Ghosh? Or when Joerg ends
up in a nursing home? If we don't educate the public, this knowledge will be
lost. Who then will be left to develop advanced technologies, to push computer
science forward, to have an understanding of why things were implemented the
way they were?
Just look "around you" on this mailing list. How many "newbies" do we see daily
complaining why some feature XYZ from their Linux distro isn't present, only because they don't
know System V and therefore don't know it's already been there for DECADES? How many people do we
have asking about GNU functionality not being present inside of System V tools, because they don't
have the knowledge and experience to understand that the point *is not* implementing tools within
other tools, but stringing the tools together for maximum flexibility?
My point is, quite simply, if we dumb everything down, once we're gone, the
knowledge and experience might very well be lost. Forever. And I dread to
imagine what IT and CS will look like without it. It's turning into a nightmare
already.
So this approach of "dumbing things down" for the "newbie" can very well turn to be the
undoing of IT and CS. Who will be left to work on all this advanced stuff if we raise a generation of
"clicky-bunty" masses? It's already a bad, bad problem today. What will it look like in ten or
twenty years from now?
You certainly do have a point from a different angle. I'd agree with
you on this CS/IT skill thing. I've had CS students asking me: What
is Unix ? Is it something similar to Linux ? I have interviewed folks
who have done Java Web Services development but did not know
how to set the CLASSPATH. For that matter how many of the Visual
C++ weenies would have even heard of something called WinMain ?
I have seen folks among the IDE crowd having no idea of Event Loops
or Makefiles. I have seen many "systems programmers" who cannot
distinguish between systems calls and library functions, or the criteria
for claiming to be a systems programmer is to have used open, close,
read, write.
The list goes on and on. But isn't the root cause of this sad situation
at some different point - academics. Isn't it the responsibility of the
academic institutions to focus on basics using CLI - IMHO start with
BASIC and Shells. Students in a hurry to get projects done use
clicky-bunty IDEs to just finish the work. Institutions in a hurry to
keep pace with the Industry Buzzwords skip teaching the basics.
The problem domain is different and needs to be tackled somewhere
else. Keeping the Human-Computer interface un-dumbed and difficult
to use won't really achieve the desired result. It will result in the
OS in
question being ignored and relegated to a niche because there are
always alternatives which are easy to use. Ease of use is always a
multi-edged sword but is nevertheless necessary and it's definition
varies with the target audience. In fact slick interfaces require a
lot of
skill to develop and maintain - whether it is a slick CLI or a slick GUI.
I'd rather be optimistic since there will always be inquisitive people
who want to dig underneath the pretty interfaces and get their hands
dirty, there will always be hackers, scientists, innovators - human
nature, thirst for knowledge after all.
How easy it is to use the Computers on board the USS Enterprise NCC
1701, and we still have geniuses like Scotty and La Forge - my kind of
future.
Regards,
Moinak.
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