> For anyone willing to at least pick up a dictionary and make SOME effort
to
> speak the native lingo, a DOS-like shell for Linux can be found at
> http://people.cs.uct.ac.za/~mwelz/lsh.html Many, many more can be found at
> http://www.tuxfinder.com/thematic/tree.php3?category=16 including a number
> that us an ANSI-text-based GUI interface. There are choices. They are all
> free. All may contribute.
Since I am basically learning them all at the same time, there is no habit
pattern to overcome, which would be the case if I was already tightly locked
into a single shell, or computer language. In fact, it is sort of cool,
since I am reading and practicing with or using (at a student level):
(shells) DOS shell, BASH, BOURNE, and I think C shells (FreeBDS), plus the
OS/2 DOS shell, and (languages) G BASIC, A-BASIC, QBASIC, VBASIC, Perl,
Java, and just starting to poke my nose into Pascal and C.
At first I thought looking at so many different OS's and languages
simultaneously might be very confusing, but so far, that has not been the
case, especially since some of them are really old, and only useful in a
'preparatory' sense, to see how their more recent offspring developed. What
is cool, is seeing how the earlier languages tie into the operating systems,
especially the tie-ins between DOS batch files and macro commands, and the
BASIC languages, and their Unix file and command counterparts, and the Perl
language. Also, studying multiple languages from the start has given me some
overview, as to how all languages are similar... and how some differ in ways
that make certain things easier and more natural to each particular
language, while making other things more difficult. I figure that by the
time I take the big intellectual plunge into C and Assembly (I am saving
that for cooler weather) I will begin to have a basic (not BASIC)
understanding of how OS's and their programming languages do what-all it is
they do, to make the physical machines dance to the individual's tune (at
least most of the time). I figure that then and only then will I be in a
position to make a really commonsense decision about which direction to take
in programming.
SURVPC is very cool. I think that newer people coming into the field right
now are being somewhat crippled in their attempts to learn, by the fact that
computing is old enough now to require a historic context, but does not yet
have any such organised historic context. (at least I haven't found one yet,
in book form) The first generations of programmers learned the stuff I am
picking up in bits and pieces in places like this list, automatically,
because they were working in the field at its birth. Since then, however,
each successive layer of complexity that has been added to the field has
served to obscure what lies underneath. New books are written quickly, in a
mad rush to be the first ones on the shelves, and are written in a very 'how
to' manner, with the presumption that the reader already understands what
came before. Someone like myself, deciding to learn Perl for instance, will
be hard pressed to find any understandable explanations as to 'why', in the
newer books... just 'how', which promotes memorization in place of
understanding.
My own 'newbie' guess, at the moment, is that Windows was pretty much
designed to become extinct, for some of the reasons I have outlined above.
Since it's not open source, no-one but a select few can ever see what it
really looks like under the hood. It can never be quoted in other peoples'
work. Can you imagine what it would have done to the development of the
English language if William Shakespeare had copyrighted all of the cool
idioms and amazing phrases he created, and people had either had to pay him
a royalty every time they spoke them, or get sued?
Heh.
-wittig http://www.robertwittig.com/
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