[Linux-aus] [luv-talk] Should I feel sorry for Queenslanders?!

[Daniel Jitnah]

> 
> But seriously...  many people of my generation were brought up (home and
> school) on the Apple IIe, PC XT/286/386, DOS, Windows 3.1, Word 5.1,
> ClarisWorks, Microsoft Works... almost none of which I used after leaving
> school and none of which are relevant now.
> 
> My first year Uni (1996) included Unix shell scripting,

It would have been necessary to learn the basics of any Unix shell to do
anything useful on a Unix machine.  Some may have learnt the Bourne
shell and some the C shell or whatever else.

> C++ and COBOL

At least learning 2 languages as different as C++ and Cobol would have
given an appreciation of similarities and differences in the languages,
and hence help someone make a critical judgement about choice of
programming language for a particular situation. I doubt that an MCSE
course will really gear someone to be able to make a similar critical
choice of language and platform, if it is not .NET.

Take another example, if you are learning MSSQL, it is unimaginable that
the course will not be geared to emphasise MSSQL specific so called
"enhancement" features, and students will be brain washed to use them.
Out in the real world, if faced with a situation where this person has
to make a choice between MSSQL and say Postgres or MariaDB, the chances
that MSSQL will win is very high. (same argument applies to Oracle btw)

At Yr 12, a student should be equipped to make decisions for the rest of
his/her life, ie: 50+ years, and not for the life of the current or next
software product.


Daniel.

> programming - which I thought were archaic at the time but looking back I
> think they were fine for teaching general programming concepts.  It also
> included things with such as some DOS scripting involving piping commands
> into edlin - basically really dodgy hacks.  I always thought this was
> archaic as well but in the context of this discussion it taught us how to
> do reasonably complicated things with extremely basic tools.  A bit like
> XO-1s, Raspberry Pis and Arduinos.
> 
> Regards,
> 
> Charles
> 
> 
> 
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