Re: [Haifux] using unix page: early draft
On Mon, 17 Sep 2001, Tzafrir Cohen wrote: I wanted to write a couple of pages intented mainly for students of the course Matam in the CS faculty in the Technion. This is the course where most of them meet unix. I pu an initial and partial draft in http://www.technion.ac.il/~tzafrir/Haifux/unix_use.html . Comments (possibly in private mail) are welcomed. sent in private mail. In this course the students write two c++ assignments, and one csh assignment (right, Alon?) nope. one c assignment 'advanced c', one c assignment 'modularity (oop) in c', one csh assignemnt and one c++ assignment. -- mulix http://www.advogato.com/person/mulix http://www.sf.net/projects/syscalltrack -- Haifa Linux Club Mailing List (http://linuxclub.il.eu.org) To unsub send an empty message to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[Haifux] Re: using unix page: early draft
On Mon, 17 Sep 2001, Shlomi Fish wrote: On Mon, 17 Sep 2001, mulix wrote: On Mon, 17 Sep 2001, Nadav Har'El wrote: On Mon, Sep 17, 2001, Tzafrir Cohen wrote about [Haifux] using unix page: early draft: In this course the students write two c++ assignments, and one csh assignment (right, Alon?) Forgive my asking (I guess that everybody here already knows my position on csh ;)), but why is the Technion still teaching csh?? Csh has been considered inferior to almost any alternative (ksh, bash, zsh) for at least a decade... Do they teach csh anywhere else in the world? the technion teaches csh, i suppose, because by the time most students take this course (second semester), the ONLY programming language they've seen is, you guessed it, c. [1] the common wisdom says that it's better not to confuse them with a different programming language syntax. an interesting trivia peace is that the csh assignment is considered by far the easiest in the class, and usually takes the least time to complete. Hello? If C-shell looks like C as much as French looks like English, IMO. Sure, they use the same alphabet, but knowledge on one language will give you very little help in understanding the other. if csh is to c as english is to french, bash to c is as english to arabic. nothing alike, syntax-wise. csh at least LOOKS familiar, which sure seems like a lot to a frightened freshman. I found the bourne shell to have a much better syntax than C-shell, and found C-shell to be awfully limiting and illogical. I think the Technion should make students get used to learning a new syntax, because there are a lot of syntaxes out there. i think the technion should not be teaching c as a first language, but rather c++ or even java. i think (some) technion computer science professors should know what they are talking about even if it is outside their direct area of expertise. i think technion programming excersizes (and tests!) should be more than an excersize in programming trivia. i think a lot of things about the technion's way of teaching, and i've made all of them known to the proper people. did it help? niet. in contrast, i dont mind the technion teaching csh. it's a useful tool. I think that academic studies should teach something that would prove useful outside their academic studies. And C-Shell is not useful. I saw how in an assignment we were given in Structure of OSes (of EE), which csh is useful. there are a lot of csh scripts out there (who knows how many of them were written by technion graduates? ;)) bash is useful too. and so is perl. and sed, and awk. and python, my favorite new langauge. what's my point? i dont have one. i'm just rambling. specifically asked for a C-shell script, two students over-blown their script just so they can handle directory names with whitespace. Needless to say, in the bourne shell this is a non-issue which can be easily solved. there's always a better tool. so what's your point? -- mulix http://www.advogato.com/person/mulix http://www.sf.net/projects/syscalltrack -- Haifa Linux Club Mailing List (http://linuxclub.il.eu.org) To unsub send an empty message to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[Haifux] Re: using unix page: early draft
On Mon, Sep 17, 2001, mulix wrote about Re: using unix page: early draft: On Mon, 17 Sep 2001, Shlomi Fish wrote: if csh is to c as english is to french, bash to c is as english to arabic. nothing alike, syntax-wise. csh at least LOOKS familiar, which sure seems like a lot to a frightened freshman. This is completely silly. When I was a freshmen, I studied infi and algebra (for example) in the same semester. Two completely different things. Who says you can't learn two different things?? If C and shell were the same thing, there would have been no reason to learn them both anyway! Do you know what? I learnt sh (bourne shell) and C when I was 10, reading a book in English when I barely knew English, and knew nothing about computers. If I managed to do it, so can the students in the Technion at the age of 20. Give them a little credit - they are not total idiots :) As someone already mentioned, learning two different syntaxes is actually a good preperation for a world filled with dozens of languages with different syntaxes. i think the technion should not be teaching c as a first language, but rather c++ or even java. This is a seperate debate, and I personally don't agree: I think C++ is a much more complex language than C, and it's much harder to write *good* programs with it (i.e., a program which an expert can look at it and say: yeah, that's a good way to code what you wanted to do!). I've seen too many examples of people writing bad code in C++, which is even harder to fix or understand than bad code in C. If C++ is used as some sort of C + overloading tricks + a small class instead of a small struct, I'd rather them teaching C first. in contrast, i dont mind the technion teaching csh. it's a useful tool. No it isn't. It's as a useful tool as a worn-out screwdriver: when you go out to the outside world, once in a while you'll need to use a screwdriver that has been worn-out, and you'll need to settle with it. But it's no reason to learn only about worn-out screwdrivers. Usually you have the choice, and you need to know how a good screwdriver looks like, where to get one, and how to use it, and not go into a hardware store saying I get confused with all those brand-new screwdrivers - we didn't have those when I was studying. Do you have some crappy worn-out one?. csh is useful. there are a lot of csh scripts out there (who knows how many of them were written by technion graduates? ;)) I've never seen a csh script written by someone who actually knew what he or she was doing. Sorry... It's useful to read csh (and I do), but never to write it. specifically asked for a C-shell script, two students over-blown their script just so they can handle directory names with whitespace. Needless to say, in the bourne shell this is a non-issue which can be easily solved. there's always a better tool. so what's your point? betterness of tools is not a linear ordering. You can't say csh bash perl C++ lisp Because usually when you take a pair of tools (e.g., bash and perl) each one is better in different things. Perl is not a convenient replacement to sh when it comes to writing short scripts with mostly pipelines of existing utilities, while bash is not a convenient replacement to perl when it comes to complicated text and number handling. However, in this case clearly csh bash, in every case (can you show an example where csh is better than bash?), which is why you can teach csh as some archaic language (like Latin is taught), but it should not be taught as the tool of choice. Tools which are always inferior to others should go the way of the dodo. This is why no-one uses 'ed' anymore for interactive editing, and nobody lights their house with candles, to use just two silly examples. csh is just as silly, in my opinion. -- Nadav Har'El|Monday, Sep 17 2001, 29 Elul 5761 [EMAIL PROTECTED] |- Phone: +972-53-245868, ICQ 13349191 |Never be afraid to tell the world who http://nadav.harel.org.il |you are. -- Anonymous -- Haifa Linux Club Mailing List (http://linuxclub.il.eu.org) To unsub send an empty message to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[Haifux] Re: using unix page: early draft
On Mon, 17 Sep 2001, Nadav Har'El wrote: On Mon, Sep 17, 2001, mulix wrote about Re: using unix page: early draft: in contrast, i dont mind the technion teaching csh. it's a useful tool. No it isn't. It's as a useful tool as a worn-out screwdriver: when you go out to the outside world, once in a while you'll need to use a screwdriver that has been worn-out, and you'll need to settle with it. But it's no reason to learn only about worn-out screwdrivers. Usually you have the choice, and you need to know how a good screwdriver looks like, where to get one, and how to use it, and not go into a hardware store saying I get confused with all those brand-new screwdrivers - we didn't have those when I was studying. Do you have some crappy worn-out one?. Nadav: keep in mind that csh is not _that_ different from bourne shell. Syntacticaly, both can run as scripts (although in this course they don't explain what does the '#!'does), and both use very similar syntax for comments and variables, and (o., that's where te syntactic similarity ends) But both imply very similar methods: the syntax of each shell is not rich enough to do the actual processing, and the actual processing has to be done by other simple tools (the same set of tools for csh and bourne shell). So if you know csh, learning bourne shell isn't that difficult. You hopefully know how to look in different man pages and have some ideas on what tools to use. Given the lazyness factor (changing the sylabus requires changing the available materials, writing exam questions from scratch, students bitching about the booklet of last year not good for this year, students bitching about no bash questions in the exams booklet, staff doesn't know bourne shell ;-)) it would take a better reason than that to change the course material. -- Tzafrir Cohen mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.technion.ac.il/~tzafrir -- Haifa Linux Club Mailing List (http://linuxclub.il.eu.org) To unsub send an empty message to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: [Haifux] choo's take on the site
On Mon, 17 Sep 2001, guy keren wrote: i got annoyed with the general attitude, so i decided to sit down and design a site. you can see the results at http://users.actcom.co.il/~choo/haifux/ Simple and nice. I like it. a few notes: snipped 3. regarding the logo (tux-at-home.gif) - i wish to write 'Haifux' along side tux's shoulder (to the left of tux, from buttom-left to top-right). i created an image with this text, only that i had to write the word pixel by pixel, and i did a bad job (http://users.actcom.co.il/~choo/haifux/tux-at-haifux.gif). GIFs!?? As far as I know, GIF is proprietary format whose use requires license from UNI$Y$. As a group promoting open-source and free software (I think we are that, aren't we:-), we should not use it. PNG is a free replacement of GIF. Does anybody know if all the popular (both broken and less broken ;-) browsers support it? Emil snipped -- Haifa Linux Club Mailing List (http://linuxclub.il.eu.org) To unsub send an empty message to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[Haifux] Re: choo's take on the site
On Mon, 17 Sep 2001, Kohn Emil Dan wrote: a few notes: snipped 3. regarding the logo (tux-at-home.gif) - i wish to write 'Haifux' along side tux's shoulder (to the left of tux, from buttom-left to top-right). i created an image with this text, only that i had to write the word pixel by pixel, and i did a bad job (http://users.actcom.co.il/~choo/haifux/tux-at-haifux.gif). GIFs!?? As far as I know, GIF is proprietary format whose use requires license from UNI$Y$. As a group promoting open-source and free software (I think we are that, aren't we:-), we should not use it. PNG is a free replacement of GIF. Does anybody know if all the popular (both broken and less broken ;-) browsers support it? AFAIK, in Israel we don't need to have a license to use GIFs. But I'm not sure about it, and besides there is the issue of world-wide Open Source solidarity. Netscape 4.x and IE 4.x (not to mention Konq, NS 6.1, IE 5.0, Opera, whatever) all support PNG. And PNG is by far superior to GIF, not counting the fact that it doesn't support animations. (and we all know animated GIFs are Evil with a capital E). In case you do _need_ animations there are mngs. GIMP and similar tools can generate PNGs very well. (GIMP has some problem with a palette based index and alpha, though). And there's a tool called gif2png (By ESR) that enables converting a gif (or an entire site) to a png. Regards, Shlomi Fish Emil snipped -- Haifa Linux Club Mailing List (http://linuxclub.il.eu.org) To unsub send an empty message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- Shlomi Fish[EMAIL PROTECTED] Home Page: http://t2.technion.ac.il/~shlomif/ Home E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] A more experienced programmer does not make less bugs. He just realizes what went wrong more quickly. -- Haifa Linux Club Mailing List (http://linuxclub.il.eu.org) To unsub send an empty message to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[Haifux] Sources of the new sites
Tzafrir, Guy, and anybody else who prepared a new site format - could you be so kind as to make the sources of the new site (minus all the lectures, of course) available somewhere, so it would be possible to modify them? By sources I mean a tar.gz file that contains whatever templates were used to generate them. Regards, Shlomi Fish -- Shlomi Fish[EMAIL PROTECTED] Home Page: http://t2.technion.ac.il/~shlomif/ Home E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] A more experienced programmer does not make less bugs. He just realizes what went wrong more quickly. -- Haifa Linux Club Mailing List (http://linuxclub.il.eu.org) To unsub send an empty message to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: [Haifux] Re: choo's take on the site
On Mon, 17 Sep 2001, Shlomi Fish wrote: On Mon, 17 Sep 2001, Kohn Emil Dan wrote: GIFs!?? As far as I know, GIF is proprietary format whose use requires license from UNI$Y$. As a group promoting open-source and free software (I think we are that, aren't we:-), we should not use it. PNG is a free replacement of GIF. Does anybody know if all the popular (both broken and less broken ;-) browsers support it? AFAIK, in Israel we don't need to have a license to use GIFs. But I'm not sure about it, and besides there is the issue of world-wide Open Source solidarity. Netscape 4.x and IE 4.x (not to mention Konq, NS 6.1, IE 5.0, Opera, whatever) all support PNG. And PNG is by far superior to GIF, not counting the fact that it doesn't support animations. (and we all know animated GIFs are Evil with a capital E). In case you do _need_ animations there are mngs. There is one issue, though: All relevant browsers support transparent GIFs well. Not all of those that support png also support transparent PNGs (alpha-tranparency or something). (There is the issue of animated gifs. MNGs are far less supported. But we don't need animated icons for our site). -- Tzafrir Cohen mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.technion.ac.il/~tzafrir -- Haifa Linux Club Mailing List (http://linuxclub.il.eu.org) To unsub send an empty message to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: [Haifux] choo's take on the site
On Mon, 17 Sep 2001, Kohn Emil Dan wrote: 3. regarding the logo (tux-at-home.gif) - i wish to write 'Haifux' along [...] GIFs!?? As far as I know, GIF is proprietary format whose use requires license from UNI$Y$. As a group promoting open-source and free software (I think we are that, aren't we:-), we should not use it. PNG is a free replacement of GIF. Does anybody know if all the popular (both broken and less broken ;-) browsers support it? actually, i intended to generate a png, not a gif, but my gimp (one that comes with rh6.2) kept having a 'plugin crash' when i tried saving a png file, so i decided not to bother with it for now. this icon isn't final anyway. -- guy For world domination - press 1, or dial 0, and please hold, for the creator. -- nob o. dy -- Haifa Linux Club Mailing List (http://linuxclub.il.eu.org) To unsub send an empty message to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[Haifux] Re: choo's take on the site
On Mon, 17 Sep 2001, guy keren wrote: On Mon, 17 Sep 2001, Kohn Emil Dan wrote: 3. regarding the logo (tux-at-home.gif) - i wish to write 'Haifux' along [...] GIFs!?? As far as I know, GIF is proprietary format whose use requires license from UNI$Y$. As a group promoting open-source and free software (I think we are that, aren't we:-), we should not use it. PNG is a free replacement of GIF. Does anybody know if all the popular (both broken and less broken ;-) browsers support it? actually, i intended to generate a png, not a gif, but my gimp (one that comes with rh6.2) kept having a 'plugin crash' when i tried saving a png file, so i decided not to bother with it for now. this icon isn't final anyway. One word for you: upgrade to gimp 1.2.2 (or is it 1.2.3 by now) and to the newest libpng. You can try hunting the web for RPMs. In any case, using GIMP 1.0.x is considered bad for your else. If all else fails, you can use gif2png. Regards, Shlomi Fish -- guy For world domination - press 1, or dial 0, and please hold, for the creator. -- nob o. dy -- Haifa Linux Club Mailing List (http://linuxclub.il.eu.org) To unsub send an empty message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- Shlomi Fish[EMAIL PROTECTED] Home Page: http://t2.technion.ac.il/~shlomif/ Home E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] A more experienced programmer does not make less bugs. He just realizes what went wrong more quickly. -- Haifa Linux Club Mailing List (http://linuxclub.il.eu.org) To unsub send an empty message to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: [Haifux] Re: using unix page: early draft
On Mon, Sep 17, 2001, Alon Altman wrote about Re: [Haifux] Re: using unix page: early draft: On Mon, 17 Sep 2001, Nadav Har'El wrote: You can teach csh as some archaic language (like Latin is taught), but it should not be taught as the tool of choice. So, the ingenious solution would be to teach Intercal, Befunge, and Brainf**k, so the students can see interesting new languages, right? No. I thought I was clear: I just said that sh (or bash, or whatever) should be taught instead of csh. One instead of one. A better one instead of a crappy one. A useful one (probably 99% of shell scripts in a typical unix system are written in /bin/sh, not csh) instead of a useless one. I didn't say anything about learning more crazy (and 100% useless) languages, and I didn't say anything which is overly ideal like mulix suggested. If you TAs only know how to copy the notes of the people before you, and the professors can't be bothered to learn a new (new? /bin/sh has existed for about 25 years!!) language, and everyone continues to teach something which they know is suboptimal - then I just have to say that this is a sad state of affairs for the Technion. Remember - if you agree that something is suboptimal - even if only slightly - then it is the teacher's duty to teach the optimal thing. The 10 hours of work for making new exercises by the teacher is nothing compared to all the crap the hundreds of students taking this course will eat later by using csh. I'll shut up on this issue now, until perhaps one day I'll come back to the Technion as a PhD candidate and try to change this from the inside ;) -- Nadav Har'El| Tuesday, Sep 18 2001, 1 Tishri 5762 [EMAIL PROTECTED] |- Phone: +972-53-245868, ICQ 13349191 |From the Linux getopt(3) manpage: BUGS: http://nadav.harel.org.il |This manpage is confusing. -- Haifa Linux Club Mailing List (http://linuxclub.il.eu.org) To unsub send an empty message to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: [Haifux] Technion's CS dept. course - Matam (was re:...)
On Tue, 18 Sep 2001, Orr Dunkelman wrote:
luckily for me I found out UNIX to be a very nice plaything (and started
playing with it), but most didn't. by having a short explanation on how to
use gdb (or ddd, without refering to quality, ddd was a great for me, as
all I needed was a simle GUI debuger, not multi-process, multi-thrread,
kernel code) people might get hooked on UNIX (and of course Linux).
I generally think that tools available under X are easier to use (e.g:
compare gvim to vim and {gnu|x}emacs/X to {gnu|x}emacs in a terminal. It
simply looks more familiar (and you can open many more xterms :-p''') .
This was why one of my points was Use X-Windows.
Please have a look at the mata site
(http://www.cs.technion.ac.il/~cs234122/ ) and read the first tutorial
that is available from there. It contains an introduction to unix
(Format: MS-Word-produced postscript. Wou may need to cut a few heqader
lines to make the document a valid postscript document with correc
'magic').
Spesifically: What do you think about their introduction to gdb?
--
Tzafrir Cohen
mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://www.technion.ac.il/~tzafrir
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