Re: fdm, paredit and systemd

On Fri, 7 Mar 2025, Salvador Mirzo wrote:

Yeah---there's a fine line between incrementing language and sticking
with the previous, well-established vocabulary.  That's particularly
important for hackers because they have an imense amount of vocabulary
to manage and great fluency is essential to their day-to-day operations.

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Another example from hell for me is powershell. I've never seen such long
command! Microsoft powershell gurus must really enjoy typing!

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Besides, it's yet another shell.  Even if it were really great...  Have
you seen Plan9's rc?  It's a very neat shell.  But it's not Bourne's sh.
It's hard to overcome the inertia of a large body moving at high speed.

Never seen. How does it differ from plain old bash? Inertia is a problem. Many
young children I think use zsh on Macs, somehow, bash was what I had when I was
young, and it stuck. ;)

Oh believe me... I've had to _fight_ to keep any resemblance of
teaching basic bash scripting in the linux course. At first students
hate it, but the brilliant ones later on tell me that they actually
picked up a lot of linux while bash scripting, instead of if we used
python or something else. This makes me happy and works as intended!
;)

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No shell scripting?  Okay---let's investigate a bit how the system
works.  ``What's in a name?  A rose by any other name would smell as
sweet.''  That's from a teacher I had called Juliet---she was pretty

True. I'm currently discussing the course plans for the autumn, I think I have a
good chance at sneaking in some good old shell through the backdoor. Keep your
fingers crossed! =D

In other words, I'd go for depth, not immediate working knowledge.
Every system administrator will have to grind through the manuals
anyway.  Knowing how to start or stop daemons, say, in a particular
system would not be terribly useful in a classroom.  Of course, we would
see how run the commands in whatever system we're using for the
illustrations at the black board or at the computer lab, but merely to
see things in motion.

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I wish we could do that... but the amount of teaching hours and focus
on the vocation schools make that very difficult. =(

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I know.
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I also think that we shouldn't interfere so much with nature's course.
It's not that we don't care---it's that we respect the group.  Let's let
the group follow its ``natural'' course.  It's different when we're the
captain; we then steer as we like.

True!

 You can be the captain
 And I'll draw the chart
 Sailing into destiny
 Closer to the heart
 -- Neil Peart, Peter Talbot, 1977
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