I have no intention of using Apache or MySQL, so why LAMP?
Furthermore, there are plenty of devs may never be on the web-app-dev/linux side of the world, so what's the point of Apache? (client-side development, internal application development).
Most will, but not everyone; and in that most, they might use the Windows stack version of LAMP: Windows, IIS, SQL Server, [favorite .NET language]
What I said was, "every CS student SHOULD be able to configure LAMP." If you graduate with a degree and you can't configure the easiest web stack possible, then something went terribly wrong.
edit sub LAMP with WISC# or whatever you want. The specific technologies aren't the point of the article. It's far more useful for him to say, "Do this in Python" for somebody that is currently in a CS cirriculum. If he would have said, "configure a web stack using your database and application layer of choice," many would be (unfortunately) be lost.
This is kind of meaningless. Every CS student should be able to do X, but that doesn't mean every CS student should actually do X. X here could be "set up LAMP", "implement a linked list in every language you know", "read Mozilla's nsString code", "microwave a bag of popcorn", "part your hair in the middle", or "read Twilight: New Moon". A CS student should be able to accomplish these tasks, but that doesn't mean that a CS student should actually set a goal to do any of these things.
I've set up a LAMP stack before. I did it because I had a reason to, not because it was a meaningful learning experience. Setting up LAMP is sysadmin work. It has exactly nothing to do with CS.
I got a job where I learned pretty much everything I could about the LAMP stack within a couple of months. I purposefully ignored everything to do with web programming when I was in uni because I wasn't even the slightest bit interested.
A computer science student should be able to get up to speed fairly quickly on any computer science subject - they shouldn't be an expert on all computer science when they graduate (although they probably will have a specialization in which they're pretty good).
I think you've confused your specialty with the whole of computer science here. I have no idea how to configure any sort of web stack, but I certainly think I got a good value out of my degree. I bet that many people who would have no idea how to go about writing device drivers if you gave them a chip's datasheet, but that just means that they're pursuing a different specialty, not that they or their school is incompetent.
Surely there's not much of it, not with everyone's toaster now getting IP6 addresses and heart pacemakers having built in wireless web servers. </sarcastic-hyperbole-masking-genuine-enquiry>
It was "beneath them", yet to me that's like an airplane pilot that doesn't know how to drive a car. Being able to fly a plane is great, but what about when you just want to get across town and buy some groceries?
Ask me about microcontroller programming or writing code to control the real world and I'll talk your ear off. Ask me about web stuff and my knowledge stops at PHP.
> it’s about doing, as opposed to knowing or learning
After graduating, I had to teach myself everything in that list before I could actually do anything that I found interesting. Now, this obviously doesn't apply if you're, as you say, writing a compiler, but for the average CS student, this is a great list to complete.
This is a list of hard things to do from a beginner, freshman, perspective. But they are also highly necessary if you want to work on fun stuff later on.
A sysadmin who doesn't understand pools of threads will go nowhere, same goes for a developpers who doesn't know what database replication implies.
I've had to work with customers before who were writing code to send data over XML to a web server before who had no idea how to use tcpdump and Wireshark - it was unbelievable, but I was able to show them bugs in their code because I could see where the TCP conversation broke down.
I've learned how to read the packets coming through in real time, at an office environment. I can tell people "I don't even see the code anymore, all I see is blonde, brunette, redhead."