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[UPDATE 20191112_223013 UTC: Per original author's request, I hereby note this is an edited excerpt and not an exact quote from the blog post linked below. --martyb]
Submitted via IRC for Bytram
Three of the Hundred Falsehoods CS Students Believe
Jan Schauma recently posted a list of one hundred Falsehoods CS Students (Still) Believe Upon Graduating. There is much good fun here, especially for a prof who tries to help CS students get ready for the world, and a fair amount of truth, too. I will limit my brief comments to three items that have been on my mind recently even before reading this list.
18. 'Email' and 'Gmail' are synonymous.
CS grads are users, too, and their use of Gmail, and systems modeled after it, contributes to the truths of modern email: top posting all the time, with never a thought of trimming anything. Two-line messages sitting atop icebergs of text which will never be read again, only stored in the seemingly infinite space given us for free.
38. Employers care about which courses they took.
It's the time of year when students register for spring semester courses, so I've been meeting with a lot of students. (Twice as many as usual, covering for a colleague on sabbatical.) It's interesting to encounter students on both ends of the continuum between not caring at all what courses they take and caring a bit too much. The former are so incurious I wonder how they fell into the major at all. The latter are often more curious but sometimes are captive to the idea that they must, must, must take a specific course, even if it meets at a time they can't attend or is full by the time they register.
90. Two people with a CS degree will have a very similar background and shared experience/knowledge.
This falsehood operates in a similar space to #38, but at the global level I reached at the end of my previous paragraph. Even students who take most of the same courses together will usually end their four years in the program with very different knowledge and experiences.
The complete list is available at www.netmeister.org.
(Score: 2) by YeaWhatevs on Tuesday November 12 2019, @01:23PM (9 children)
Sure, it's just someone's personal gripe list, dressed up as humor, but it's hard to read without feeling the list if off.
Take these two:
"Linux and Unix are synonymous"
"Bash and sh are synonymous"
They're not the same and the author cares greatly about the difference. Thing is, I don't really care. They are equivalent in the ways that matter to me. Also, I have much more pressing things to worry about. Unless I have a problem specifically tied to the differences, then I care for about 5 minutes before I go back to not caring anymore.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by bart on Tuesday November 12 2019, @01:55PM (4 children)
If you don't really care, you probably haven't run into issues caused by the differences (bash vs sh is pretty significant!)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 12 2019, @02:21PM
Plus the security fixes for that exploit a number of years back broke a TON of old scripts that made use of the behavior, intentionallly or unintentionally, as did later coreutils versions which require a baroque environmental variable to run in legacy compatibility mode, a mode wich all the loki games based installers required, one of the reasons the installer outlasted the company by 5-10 years then suddenly died overnight.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Tuesday November 12 2019, @05:11PM (1 child)
Well, if you've got bash installed, sh is probably a link to it. But there are several shells that are "pretty much the same" but which have differences in detail, and they all tend to get linked to sh if they're installed as the system shell. I think the original UNIX shell was named sh, but I haven't run into it in a decade. If I did it would need to be renamed to work on my system.
FWIW, I did at one time work on an AT&T UNIX system, but I never learned the details, even though I was the "system administrator". There was no one around to teach me, and my real job was to design and implement a multi-user database accessed by modem. So while I used the command "sh", I don't know whether it was the native command, or a link to something else.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 13 2019, @05:37AM
The first UNIX shell was, I believe, the Thompson shell. This, however, was too limited so they replaced it with PWB in version 5, then the Bourne shell (the infamous /bin/sh) was system 7 or 8, IIRC. From there, the Korn shell, C shell, Almquist shell and a few others splintered out for different reasons. It wasn't until '89 when the first POSIX came out that /bin/sh was formally declared to somehow be an executable to a POSIX-compatible shell. Due to this, a number of shells made or maintained after this will check their argv[0] to see whether they should activate their "POSIX-conformant" mode by default. This is why your cross-platfrom scripts shebang should almost always be /bin/sh but your user shell should be /bin/bash or /bin/tcsh/ or /bin/fish or whatever.
(Score: 1) by bmimatt on Wednesday November 13 2019, @08:25AM
You've jogged my aged Solaris memories where sh, not bash, was used for default root shell. One of the reasons - bash was not a 'built-in' shell, so you could lock yourself up if you changed root's default shell to bash, whereas sh was part of the shipped system.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 12 2019, @01:57PM (2 children)
But those 2 quotes from the article are factually true.
The fact that "you don't care" is irrelevant.
You only care about Linux. That's fine, but it doesn't invalidate that students getting a CS educate should learn that OSes are not limited to Linux, macOS, and Windows. Linux in many areas is not the pinnacle of decades of OS design and refinement. Much of what less-educated people think is "Unix" is purely Linux (or GNU bash) "innovations."
(Score: 2) by YeaWhatevs on Tuesday November 12 2019, @02:52PM (1 child)
I know the difference, and I have had to program around them, just like the differences between them and Windows and MacOS systems. Still don't care. I'm fine with you caring, just hope you see it has nothing to do with having a freshly minted CS degree.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 12 2019, @04:33PM
Fair enough.
(Score: 3, Informative) by maxwell demon on Tuesday November 12 2019, @02:36PM
On some systems, bash and sh are really the same shell under another name.
When invoked as /bin/sh, bash more or less behaves like a standard sh.
Of course, some distros use another shell for /bin/sh.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.