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Comment by PaulDavisThe1st | Hacker News Reader

I worked at UW CSE from 1990-1994 as a staff member.

At the time, I saw students (at every level) woefully lacking in useful skills, and proposed to the dept. that I ran some sort of course (not necessarily for credit) that would help people understand shell programming, debugging, build processes, and more.

The idea was roundly shot down, with the central claim being that students picked all of this up as they went along, and that the journey was more important than the outcome.

I suppose I feel good that this stupid idea has passed, and that the department acknowledges the importance (for some students, at least) of this skillset.

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> The idea was roundly shot down, with the central claim being that students picked all of this up as they went along, and that the journey was more important than the outcome.

That's such a bad position for educators to take! Just picking things up as you go along, you only learn how to accomplish tasks by rote, and you can find yourself 35 years in and still be patching basic holes in your knowledge (ask me how I know this). If you're self-motivated to dive in and teach yourself the theory, you can do that. But if you are that guy, you probably aren't taking CS courses at a university in the first place.

UW CSE student from 2009-2012; there was an optional course that blazed through *NIX and shell fundamentals, and I credit it to kickstarting my ability to use the system well. Using GDB, valgrind and the like were part of a 300-level basic systems programming course.

It's kind of depressing that you need a course to teach those skills, but it's a good thing the need was (eventually) addressed.

Why is that depressing? Genuinely asking.

It's one of those things that I would expect people that age to have naturally picked up by themselves. I certainly had, for instance.

The world has changed, though, so I don't find unreasonable to have a formal course where you learn how to use a CLI.

Noone as naturally picked up CLI.

You tye characters into a terminal and you first get an error message, how do you know to fix that. How do you know what you can do? How do you know ls is what you get to get a file listing? What is a file?

In all these cases you have had to read something that tells you) - which is part of learning.

It is much and quicker to have a course to teach you.

Having courses to teach you is mor efficient otherwise why do we have schools?

However seeing many solutions of code posted on the internet I suspect many have not learnt throughj a course just random reading and picked up bad coding skills. As noted in the first answer here the author of the course is not showing good ideas in some cases, perhaps they shopuld have nbeen on a course to learn CLI.

It is a one-credit seminar, so not as much a formal course but something that can accompany your core classes (that's not clearly apparent from the website though).

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