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Re: Gmail eats Python

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  Re: Gmail eats Python Jussi Piitulainen <jpiitula@ling.helsinki.fi> - 2015-07-25 20:47 +0300
    Re: Gmail eats Python Jussi Piitulainen <jpiitula@ling.helsinki.fi> - 2015-07-25 20:52 +0300
      Re: Gmail eats Python Laura Creighton <lac@openend.se> - 2015-07-25 20:05 +0200
        Re: Gmail eats Python Jussi Piitulainen <jpiitula@ling.helsinki.fi> - 2015-07-26 08:26 +0300
    Re: Gmail eats Python Jon Ribbens <jon+usenet@unequivocal.co.uk> - 2015-07-25 18:44 +0000
    Re: Gmail eats Python Marko Rauhamaa <marko@pacujo.net> - 2015-07-25 22:42 +0300
      Re: Gmail eats Python Ben Finney <ben+python@benfinney.id.au> - 2015-07-26 10:52 +1000
      Re: Gmail eats Python Chris Angelico <rosuav@gmail.com> - 2015-07-26 10:58 +1000
      Re: Gmail eats Python Jussi Piitulainen <jpiitula@ling.helsinki.fi> - 2015-07-26 08:01 +0300
        Re: Gmail eats Python Rustom Mody <rustompmody@gmail.com> - 2015-07-25 22:28 -0700
          Re: Gmail eats Python Chris Angelico <rosuav@gmail.com> - 2015-07-26 15:34 +1000
            Re: Gmail eats Python Rustom Mody <rustompmody@gmail.com> - 2015-07-25 23:15 -0700
              Re: Gmail eats Python Chris Angelico <rosuav@gmail.com> - 2015-07-26 16:25 +1000
                Re: Gmail eats Python Marko Rauhamaa <marko@pacujo.net> - 2015-07-26 09:55 +0300
                  Re: Gmail eats Python Rustom Mody <rustompmody@gmail.com> - 2015-07-26 01:20 -0700
                    Re: Gmail eats Python Marko Rauhamaa <marko@pacujo.net> - 2015-07-26 11:35 +0300
                      Re: Gmail eats Python Rustom Mody <rustompmody@gmail.com> - 2015-07-26 01:50 -0700
                        Re: Gmail eats Python alister <alister.nospam.ware@ntlworld.com> - 2015-07-26 09:21 +0000
                          Re: Gmail eats Python Mark Lawrence <breamoreboy@yahoo.co.uk> - 2015-07-26 12:27 +0100
                        Re: Gmail eats Python Marko Rauhamaa <marko@pacujo.net> - 2015-07-26 12:51 +0300
                          Re: Gmail eats Python Chris Angelico <rosuav@gmail.com> - 2015-07-26 20:03 +1000
                            Re: Gmail eats Python Marko Rauhamaa <marko@pacujo.net> - 2015-07-26 13:31 +0300
                            Re: Gmail eats Python Jussi Piitulainen <jpiitula@ling.helsinki.fi> - 2015-07-26 14:30 +0300
                              Re: Gmail eats Python Marko Rauhamaa <marko@pacujo.net> - 2015-07-26 14:48 +0300
                                Re: Gmail eats Python random832@fastmail.us - 2015-07-29 10:51 -0400
                                Re: Gmail eats Python Larry Martell <larry.martell@gmail.com> - 2015-07-29 10:53 -0400
                        Re: Gmail eats Python Jussi Piitulainen <jpiitula@ling.helsinki.fi> - 2015-07-26 13:43 +0300
                          Re: Gmail eats Python Rustom Mody <rustompmody@gmail.com> - 2015-07-26 06:16 -0700
                          Re: Gmail eats Python Rustom Mody <rustompmody@gmail.com> - 2015-07-28 20:35 -0700
                            Re: Gmail eats Python Laura Creighton <lac@openend.se> - 2015-07-29 18:32 +0200
                Re: Gmail eats Python Grant Edwards <invalid@invalid.invalid> - 2015-07-26 15:42 +0000
              Re: Gmail eats Python Mark Lawrence <breamoreboy@yahoo.co.uk> - 2015-07-26 12:25 +0100
          Re: Gmail eats Python Grant Edwards <invalid@invalid.invalid> - 2015-07-26 15:47 +0000
            Re: Gmail eats Python Rustom Mody <rustompmody@gmail.com> - 2015-07-26 08:59 -0700
              Re: Gmail eats Python Mark Lawrence <breamoreboy@yahoo.co.uk> - 2015-07-26 18:21 +0100
              Re: Gmail eats Python Steven D'Aprano <steve@pearwood.info> - 2015-07-27 03:40 +1000
                Re: Gmail eats Python Rustom Mody <rustompmody@gmail.com> - 2015-07-26 14:34 -0700
                Re: Gmail eats Python Chris Angelico <rosuav@gmail.com> - 2015-07-27 11:47 +1000
              Re: Gmail eats Python Grant Edwards <invalid@invalid.invalid> - 2015-07-26 19:45 +0000
                Re: Gmail eats Python Rustom Mody <rustompmody@gmail.com> - 2015-07-26 14:54 -0700
    Re: Gmail eats Python Steven D'Aprano <steve@pearwood.info> - 2015-07-26 14:49 +1000
      Re: Gmail eats Python Jussi Piitulainen <jpiitula@ling.helsinki.fi> - 2015-07-26 08:37 +0300

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#94614

On Sun, Jul 26, 2015 at 7:51 PM, Marko Rauhamaa <marko@pacujo.net> wrote:
>> - What everyone calls head (of a list) emacs calls Car (Toyota?)
>
> Now you're inventing things.

No, but it's LISP rather than Emacs that calls it that. And it dates
back to an assembly language opcode. Why that got perpetuated in a
high level language, I don't know - it'd be like building a language
today and using "interrupt" as the name of its call mechanism, because
it's built on the Intel INT opcode.

ChrisA

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#94616

Chris Angelico <rosuav@gmail.com>:

> On Sun, Jul 26, 2015 at 7:51 PM, Marko Rauhamaa <marko@pacujo.net> wrote:
>>> - What everyone calls head (of a list) emacs calls Car (Toyota?)
>>
>> Now you're inventing things.
>
> No, but it's LISP rather than Emacs that calls it that.

You'd have to get into programming lisp before you encountered "car" in
emacs. It's much easier to grasp than "class" in Python.

Python still retains "lambda", BTW. And what are "strings", "floats",
"braces" and "sockets"? Only "bubblegum" and "ducktape" are missing
(however, "ducktype" is included).

> And it dates back to an assembly language opcode. Why that got
> perpetuated in a high level language, I don't know - it'd be like
> building a language today and using "interrupt" as the name of its
> call mechanism, because it's built on the Intel INT opcode.

It is funny, that's for sure. It comes from the time when the mechanics
of a computer inspired much more awe with the theorists than it does
nowadays.

The separation between layers of abstraction is a never-ending challenge
in our profession.

An anecdote:

Back in the late 80's I had to deal with the GSM MAP protocol. In
protocol layers, you would find MAP on top of the protocol stack as
follows (go go gadget M-x picture-mode):

        +-------+
        | MAP   | application
        +-------+
        | ASN.1 | presentation
        +-------+
        | TCAP  | transaction
        +-------+
        | SCCP  | session
        +-------+
        | MTP3  | network
        +-------+
        | MTP2  | link
        +-------+
        | T1/E1 | wire
        +-------+

Now you express MAP data abstractly using ASN.1's abstract notation.
Phone numbers are defined (somewhat less abstractly) as hexstrings. If
the phone number is

   1234567

you express that in MAP as

   '214365F7'H

Huh?

I wondered that aloud to Nokia Network's GSM specialist. He thought
about it for a while and then said, "Well, that way the phone number
bits go out on the wire in the right order."

In telephony protocols, the least significant bit is transmitted first
on the serial wire. So, if you want the first digit (1) to go out first,
you have to place it in the lower nibble of the first octet (in the BER
encoding of ASN.1).

I was left speechless.


Marko

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#94622

Chris Angelico writes:

> On Sun, Jul 26, 2015 at 7:51 PM, Marko Rauhamaa wrote:
>>> - What everyone calls head (of a list) emacs calls Car (Toyota?)
>>
>> Now you're inventing things.
>
> No, but it's LISP rather than Emacs that calls it that. And it dates
> back to an assembly language opcode. Why that got perpetuated in a
> high level language, I don't know - it'd be like building a language
> today and using "interrupt" as the name of its call mechanism, because
> it's built on the Intel INT opcode.

It's stuck partly *because* it's meaningless. Original LISP used
two-field cells (cons cells aka pairs) to build all structured data, and
it wouldn't have been appropriate to tie otherwise useful names for the
two fields. Should "second" mean "cdr" or should it mean "car-of-cdr"?
That depends on what data structure is being implemented by the pair.

There's also a tradition of having composites of car and cdr, up to four
deep (down to four deep?), named like cadr (meaning car of cdr), and
Lispers used to find these transparent (caar "meant" the first key in an
association list and cdar was the associated value, caadr and cdadr were
the second key and value ...). They've resisted the loss of this.

Data structure habits are more abstract now, and some conventional uses
of the concrete list structures come with aliases, notably "first" for
"car", "second" for "cadr", "rest" for "cdr" in Common Lisp.

I suppose early hackers were also incredibly tolerant of obscure names
in general.

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#94623

Jussi Piitulainen <jpiitula@ling.helsinki.fi>:

> I suppose early hackers were also incredibly tolerant of obscure names
> in general.

At first, there was only the machine language. Assembly languages
introduced "mnemonics" for the weaklings who couldn't remember the
opcodes by heart.

(Playing cards went through a somewhat similar transition when Americans
added numbers for those who couldn't immediately perceive the number of
dots on the card.)

To this day, assembly language programmers prefer to keep the mnemonics
short and leave the nonpreschoolers wondering what EIEIO could possibly
stand for.


Marko

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#94737

On Sun, Jul 26, 2015, at 07:48, Marko Rauhamaa wrote:
> At first, there was only the machine language. Assembly languages
> introduced "mnemonics" for the weaklings who couldn't remember the
> opcodes by heart.

To be fair, x86 is also a particularly terrible example of a machine
language, from the perspective of someone imagining being expected to
memorize it. Compare it with PDP-11, which had eight registers and eight
addressing modes and a whole lot less to memorize (since each of these
appears in every instruction as a single octal digit).

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#94738

On Wed, Jul 29, 2015 at 10:51 AM,  <random832@fastmail.us> wrote:
> On Sun, Jul 26, 2015, at 07:48, Marko Rauhamaa wrote:
>> At first, there was only the machine language. Assembly languages
>> introduced "mnemonics" for the weaklings who couldn't remember the
>> opcodes by heart.
>
> To be fair, x86 is also a particularly terrible example of a machine
> language, from the perspective of someone imagining being expected to
> memorize it. Compare it with PDP-11, which had eight registers and eight
> addressing modes and a whole lot less to memorize (since each of these
> appears in every instruction as a single octal digit).


6809 was the best machine language.

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#94618

Rustom Mody writes:
> On Sunday, July 26, 2015 at 2:06:00 PM UTC+5:30, Marko Rauhamaa wrote:

>> What would you like to achieve, exactly?
>
> Some attitude correction?

With all respect, take your own advice. And use an editor that works for
you.

> That emacs starts its tutorial showing how to use C-p and C-n for what
> everyone uses arrows is bad enough.

It doesn't. Those keys come three screens down the tutorial (C-h t, line
70) and are introduced as follows:

   There are several ways you can do this.  You can use the arrow keys,
   but it's more efficient to keep your hands in the standard position
   and use the commands C-p, C-b, C-f, and C-n.  These characters are
   equivalent to the four arrow keys, like this:

> That the arrow-keys are later found to work quite alright is even
> worse and speaks of a ridiculous attitude

Notice what the tutorial actually says about the arrow keys? That it
actually says something about the arrow keys, and it says it before it
introduces the mnemonic bindings?

There was a time when the arrow keys were not found to work. Quite a
while ago, but older versions of the tutorial may still be around.

An Alt is still not always available as Meta: I notice it mainly works
in my current setup, but Alt-C-(left arrow) is interpreted by my desktop
manager. Yet M-C-b works, and M-C-(left arrow) works with Esc as Meta.
It's a *system*.

But, by all means, do use an editor that works for you, and a newsreader
that works for you. I only mentioned Gnus because it's what I prefer to
use and I've had this one issue with it that turned up in a thread about
formatting code for the newsgroup. (And Emacs came up because Gnus is
implemented in Emacs.)

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#94627

On Sunday, July 26, 2015 at 4:13:17 PM UTC+5:30, Jussi Piitulainen wrote:
> Rustom Mody writes:
> > On Sunday, July 26, 2015 at 2:06:00 PM UTC+5:30, Marko Rauhamaa wrote:
> 
> >> What would you like to achieve, exactly?
> >
> > Some attitude correction?
> 
> With all respect, take your own advice. And use an editor that works for
> you.
> 
> > That emacs starts its tutorial showing how to use C-p and C-n for what
> > everyone uses arrows is bad enough.
> 
> It doesn't. Those keys come three screens down the tutorial (C-h t, line
> 70) and are introduced as follows:
> 
>    There are several ways you can do this.  You can use the arrow keys,
>    but it's more efficient to keep your hands in the standard position
>    and use the commands C-p, C-b, C-f, and C-n.  These characters are
>    equivalent to the four arrow keys, like this:
> 
> > That the arrow-keys are later found to work quite alright is even
> > worse and speaks of a ridiculous attitude
> 
> Notice what the tutorial actually says about the arrow keys? That it
> actually says something about the arrow keys, and it says it before it
> introduces the mnemonic bindings?

Ok I was wrong on that one, sorry.
[Im not sure when the last time I looked and I didnt find it]
Doesn't change the fact that there are dozens of obsoleteisms
For the old user they are mostly irrelevant
For the new they steepen the learning curve with trivia.

Funny thing is I said much the same on the emacs list just a few weeks ago:
http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/help-gnu-emacs/2015-05/msg00230.html

And nobody pointed out what you are Marko just did
[Unless I missed somethin' there as well??]

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#94719

A bizarre current gnus sob-story brought me back to this thread:
http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/help-gnu-emacs/2015-07/msg00738.html

Starts here
http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/help-gnu-emacs/2015-07/msg00591.html


On Sunday, July 26, 2015 at 4:13:17 PM UTC+5:30, Jussi Piitulainen wrote:
> Rustom Mody writes:
> > On Sunday, July 26, 2015 at 2:06:00 PM UTC+5:30, Marko Rauhamaa wrote:
> 
> >> What would you like to achieve, exactly?
> >
> > Some attitude correction?
> 
> With all respect, take your own advice. And use an editor that works for
> you.

Sorry if I seemed insulting to you and/or the emacs-devs.
I meant to say attitude of *general emacs users* is ridiculous.
Try out emacs stackexchange and tell me]

Here is a classic flamewar from one 'emacs-oldbie' ranting against changes:
http://ergoemacs.org/misc/Mark_Crispin_emacs_line_wrap_rant_2011-06-03.txt

Some snippets:
---------------------------------
- Why should users - who presumably have work to do - be obliged to do this?
 [find surprises in new versions]

- It sounds like Microsoft Word is more suitable for the sort of work that
you do.  Perhaps you ought to use Word instead of seeking to make emacs
become more like Word.

- It does no good whatsoever to tell me that I should get used to the
change.  Other machines don't have that change.  Some are still in emacs
18¹.  Others are bleeding edge.

- I should not have to customize emacs so that CTRL/A, CTRL/E, CTRL/N, and
CTRL/P continue to work the way they've done since the mid-1970s.

etc etc
--------------------------------
¹ emacs 18 dates from around 1992 (!!)


The whole point of the rant being that (some old fart thinks that) emacs should 
stay the same as it was 25 years ago and is going to scream hellfire if
a single keystroke changes.

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#94742

In a message of Tue, 28 Jul 2015 20:35:15 -0700, Rustom Mody writes:
>- I should not have to customize emacs so that CTRL/A, CTRL/E, CTRL/N, and
>CTRL/P continue to work the way they've done since the mid-1970s.
>
>etc etc
>--------------------------------
>¹ emacs 18 dates from around 1992 (!!)

No, the original one was written in 1976.

These control characters are the very basic move characters in emacs.
People have always been free to remap them if they want them to do
something else, but waking up in the morning and discovering that you
cannot move to the front of your current line, to the end ot it, one line
up and one line down  because somebody has changed this ***for everybody***
would get me quite upset, too.

Laura (happy emacs user since 1979)

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#94634

On 2015-07-26, Chris Angelico <rosuav@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Sun, Jul 26, 2015 at 4:15 PM, Rustom Mody <rustompmody@gmail.com> wrote:
>> Well Almost.
>>
>> Emacs used to stand for "Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swapping"
>> At a time when 8 MB was large. Is it today?
>> So let me ask you:
[...]
>> If you have one app to do them all, I'd like (and pay!) for it
>> If not I bet they are mutually inconsistent.
>
> For the most part, I use a single text editor. But all their
> ancillary tools are separate. Emacs tries to be absolutely
> everything, not just editing text files; that's why it's big. Size
> isn't just a matter of disk or RAM footprint, it's also (and much
> more importantly) UI complexity.
>
> It's a trade-off, of course. If you constantly have to switch programs
> to do your work, that's a different form of UI complexity.

There's always Eclipse, where you spend 30% of your time trying to get
plugins to work, 30% upgrading it, 30% trying to figure out why a
project somebody else created won't work for you, and 10% shopping for
more RAM.

-- 
Grant

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#94620

On 26/07/2015 07:15, Rustom Mody wrote:
> On Sunday, July 26, 2015 at 11:05:14 AM UTC+5:30, Chris Angelico wrote:
>> On Sun, Jul 26, 2015 at 3:28 PM, Rustom Mody  wrote:
>>> JFTR: Ive been using emacs for 20+ years.  And I have the increasing feeling
>>> that my students are getting fedup with it (and me).  Used Idle for my last python
>>> course without too much grief.  If only it were an option for 25 programming languages, and org-mode and unicode/devanagari/tex input and.
>>
>> Not sure whether you're making the point deliberately or accidentally,
>> but that's exactly why emacs is so big and heavy: "if only, if only".
>> Simpler things do less.
>
> Do you not use ½ dozen (at least) languages?

No, I use precisely one as it fits my purposes.

-- 
My fellow Pythonistas, ask not what our language can do for you, ask
what you can do for our language.

Mark Lawrence

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#94635

On 2015-07-26, Rustom Mody <rustompmody@gmail.com> wrote:

> JFTR: Ive been using emacs for 20+ years.  And I have the increasing
> feeling that my students are getting fedup with it (and me).

I don't understand.

Why do your students even _know_ (let alone care!) what editor you
use?

I admit it was years ago, but after attending three universities and
getting a BS in Computer Engineering and an MS in Computer Science and
Electrical Engieneering, I hadn't the foggiest idea what editors any
of the faculty used.  Nor would I have cared one way or the other if I
had known.

-- 
Grant

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#94637

On Sunday, July 26, 2015 at 9:17:16 PM UTC+5:30, Grant Edwards wrote:
> On 2015-07-26, Rustom Mody wrote:
> 
> > JFTR: Ive been using emacs for 20+ years.  And I have the increasing
> > feeling that my students are getting fedup with it (and me).
> 
> I don't understand.
> 
> Why do your students even _know_ (let alone care!) what editor you
> use?
> 
> I admit it was years ago, but after attending three universities and
> getting a BS in Computer Engineering and an MS in Computer Science and
> Electrical Engieneering, I hadn't the foggiest idea what editors any
> of the faculty used.  Nor would I have cared one way or the other if I
> had known.

Its 2015 now and any ½ decent teacher of programming, writes programs in front 
of the class. And debugs and hacks and pokes around OS-related stuff (ps, top 
and more arcane) etc. 

[Yeah I did hear complaints about an OS teacher who puts up PPTs and reads them
out. So the set < ½-decent is not empty I guess]

So while emacs makes everything else look rather puerile, setting it up
is such a bitch that last python course I just switched to idle.
Must admit it was more pleasant than I expected.
Except that sometimes we need C and C++ and assembly and haskell and make and 
config files and git commits and...
And so emacs (or eclipse!!) remains the only option

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#94639

On 26/07/2015 16:59, Rustom Mody wrote:
>
> So while emacs makes everything else look rather puerile, setting it up
> is such a bitch that last python course I just switched to idle.
> Must admit it was more pleasant than I expected.
> Except that sometimes we need C and C++ and assembly and haskell and make and
> config files and git commits and...
> And so emacs (or eclipse!!) remains the only option
>

Here's what you need 
http://www.infoworld.com/article/2949917/application-development/visual-studio-2015-expands-language-roster-mobile-support.html

Only takes around four hours 30 minutes to install and up to 8G of disk 
space.  Ideal for most people I'd have thought :)

-- 
My fellow Pythonistas, ask not what our language can do for you, ask
what you can do for our language.

Mark Lawrence

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#94640

On Mon, 27 Jul 2015 01:59 am, Rustom Mody wrote:

> Its 2015 now and any ½ decent teacher of programming, writes programs in
> front of the class. 

Yeah, but the fully decent teachers prepare before hand, so the students
don't have to wait while they type out the (buggy) program in front of
them.

*half a smiley*


> And debugs and hacks and pokes around OS-related stuff 
> (ps, top and more arcane) etc.

And you do that in Emacs instead of the shell?

Or IPython?


> [Yeah I did hear complaints about an OS teacher who puts up PPTs and reads
> [them out. So the set < ½-decent is not empty I guess]

Did the students really complain "Teacher X came to class prepared with code
already written"? Or was the complaint about the technology used? Or
something else?

I really don't know how I feel about this. I did maths and physics at uni,
and it seems natural for the lecturer to work through the mathematics in
front of you. I also did computer science, and it feels completely natural
for the lecturer to hand out notes with the code already written. (These
days, I suppose, you would use slides, or give them a URL and tell them to
download the code.) Except for the most trivial interactive examples in the
Python REPR, I can't imagine why anyone would want to watch the lecturer
type the code out in front of them.

I can think of one exception... watching somebody go through the iterative
process of debugging code.


> So while emacs makes everything else look rather puerile, setting it up
> is such a bitch that last python course I just switched to idle.
> Must admit it was more pleasant than I expected.
> Except that sometimes we need C and C++ and assembly and haskell and make
> and config files and git commits and...
> And so emacs (or eclipse!!) remains the only option

Um... your students are probably using Macs, Windows, and a small minority
with Linux, yes? On laptops?

Your Linux students are probably fine. Some of them probably know more than
you :-)

Mac users have access to a full BSB environment, even if most of them don't
know it.

Your Windows users are the problem. You could try GnuWin and Gnu Core
Utilities for a set of GNU tools for Windows. You could build a bootable
USB stick containing the Linux installation of your choice, and get them to
use that. (Of course, I can imagine your school/university having a
conniption fit at the thought of the liability issues if the software
erased somebody's hard drive...)

Things were much better in my day. Nobody expected the students to have
access to a computer at home. You used a dumb workstation to log into a VAX
running Unix, and used the tools the uni supplied, or a standalone Mac 512K
(if you were lucky) or Mac 128K (if you weren't), and again, you used the
tools they supplied.



-- 
Steven

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#94649

On Sunday, July 26, 2015 at 11:11:04 PM UTC+5:30, Steven D'Aprano wrote:
> On Mon, 27 Jul 2015 01:59 am, Rustom Mody wrote:
> 
> > Its 2015 now and any ½ decent teacher of programming, writes programs in
> > front of the class. 
> 
> Yeah, but the fully decent teachers prepare before hand, so the students
> don't have to wait while they type out the (buggy) program in front of
> them.
> 
> *half a smiley*
> 
> 
> > And debugs and hacks and pokes around OS-related stuff 
> > (ps, top and more arcane) etc.
> 
> And you do that in Emacs instead of the shell?
> 
> Or IPython?
> 
> 
> > [Yeah I did hear complaints about an OS teacher who puts up PPTs and reads
> > [them out. So the set < ½-decent is not empty I guess]
> 
> Did the students really complain "Teacher X came to class prepared with code
> already written"? Or was the complaint about the technology used? Or
> something else?
> 
> I really don't know how I feel about this. I did maths and physics at uni,
> and it seems natural for the lecturer to work through the mathematics in
> front of you. I also did computer science, and it feels completely natural
> for the lecturer to hand out notes with the code already written. (These
> days, I suppose, you would use slides, or give them a URL and tell them to
> download the code.) Except for the most trivial interactive examples in the
> Python REPR, I can't imagine why anyone would want to watch the lecturer
> type the code out in front of them.
> 
> I can think of one exception... watching somebody go through the iterative
> process of debugging code.
> 
> 
> > So while emacs makes everything else look rather puerile, setting it up
> > is such a bitch that last python course I just switched to idle.
> > Must admit it was more pleasant than I expected.
> > Except that sometimes we need C and C++ and assembly and haskell and make
> > and config files and git commits and...
> > And so emacs (or eclipse!!) remains the only option
> 
> Um... your students are probably using Macs, Windows, and a small minority
> with Linux, yes? On laptops?
> 
> Your Linux students are probably fine. Some of them probably know more than
> you :-)
> 
> Mac users have access to a full BSB environment, even if most of them don't
> know it.
> 
> Your Windows users are the problem.

Pretty much.
½ Linux ½ Windows, 1 mac
Tried to get everyone onto linux.
Most did. Some failed to install it.
[I actually called these stragglers for one special ubuntu-setup session.
Didn't happen for some silly reasons]
So I couldn't dictate linux, just 'suggest' it :-)
Policy-wise: College provides machines (supposedly) setup
Practically: If one relies on that, the hours the students spend with these
will end up being ¼ what they would spend on their own laptops

> You could try GnuWin and Gnu Core
> Utilities for a set of GNU tools for Windows. You could build a bootable
> USB stick containing the Linux installation of your choice, and get them to
> use that. (Of course, I can imagine your school/university having a
> conniption fit at the thought of the liability issues if the software
> erased somebody's hard drive...)
> 
> Things were much better in my day. Nobody expected the students to have
> access to a computer at home. You used a dumb workstation to log into a VAX
> running Unix, and used the tools the uni supplied, or a standalone Mac 512K
> (if you were lucky) or Mac 128K (if you weren't), and again, you used the
> tools they supplied.
> 
> 
> 
> -- 
> Steven

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#94658

On Mon, Jul 27, 2015 at 3:40 AM, Steven D'Aprano <steve@pearwood.info> wrote:
>> So while emacs makes everything else look rather puerile, setting it up
>> is such a bitch that last python course I just switched to idle.
>> Must admit it was more pleasant than I expected.
>> Except that sometimes we need C and C++ and assembly and haskell and make
>> and config files and git commits and...
>> And so emacs (or eclipse!!) remains the only option
>
> Um... your students are probably using Macs, Windows, and a small minority
> with Linux, yes? On laptops?
>
> Your Linux students are probably fine. Some of them probably know more than
> you :-)
>
> Mac users have access to a full BSB environment, even if most of them don't
> know it.
>
> Your Windows users are the problem. You could try GnuWin and Gnu Core
> Utilities for a set of GNU tools for Windows. You could build a bootable
> USB stick containing the Linux installation of your choice, and get them to
> use that. (Of course, I can imagine your school/university having a
> conniption fit at the thought of the liability issues if the software
> erased somebody's hard drive...)

There's another option, and it's what we use at Thinkful: direct all
your students to a browser-based IDE that's backed by a consistent
Linux VM. At the moment, we're recommending Cloud 9; we used to use
Nitrous, and there are plenty of other options out there. It may not
be as fast as working natively, but believe you me, it's a huge boon
to have all your students start off with something consistent! (Those
who know what they're doing are welcome to diverge from the
recommendation; I have several students who use their own desktops,
usually either Mac OS or Linux, but one uses Windows. But the same
thing still applies: playing around with the C9 IDE is the reliable
fallback for when they have trouble.)

In terms of dev environments, Linux is usually the easiest to set up -
even when you try to support umpteen distros. Partly this is because
most people who use Linux are aware of what their package manager is,
so you can say "Go and install the python-numpy package" and most of
them can figure that out (apt-get, yum, pacman, GUI front-end,
anything). Macs aren't overly difficult; as Steven says, there's
plenty of stuff available, plus it's reasonably easy to describe path
names and such in the Unix way, and have them be compatible with Linux
and Mac OS. Even the shell is almost always consistent - I've yet to
meet any student who isn't using some variant of bash. Windows, on the
other hand, is a pest to support, because so much is different. Do you
tell people to install Git Bash and work in Cygwin? Do you tell them
to grab one of the scientific Python stacks and use PowerShell? The
default shell is sufficiently weak that it needs to be replaced, but
there's no one obvious answer. So a browser-based alternative is the
way to go for us.

ChrisA

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#94646

On 2015-07-26, Rustom Mody <rustompmody@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Sunday, July 26, 2015 at 9:17:16 PM UTC+5:30, Grant Edwards wrote:
>> On 2015-07-26, Rustom Mody wrote:
>> 
>>> JFTR: Ive been using emacs for 20+ years.  And I have the increasing
>>> feeling that my students are getting fedup with it (and me).

[...]
>> Why do your students even _know_ (let alone care!) what editor you
>> use?
>> 
>> I admit it was years ago, but after attending three universities and
>> getting a BS in Computer Engineering and an MS in Computer Science and
>> Electrical Engieneering, I hadn't the foggiest idea what editors any
>> of the faculty used.  Nor would I have cared one way or the other if I
>> had known.
>
> Its 2015 now and any ½ decent teacher of programming, writes programs
> in front of the class. And debugs and hacks and pokes around
> OS-related stuff (ps, top and more arcane) etc. 

I still don't get it.

You're not teaching the _editor_, so why would it matter to anybody
which editor you're using to show them the code?  They can see the
code, and they can see what it does.  Are they too stupid to figure
out how to insert or delete a line using whatever editor they prefer?

I remember being shown live examples in a numerical programming class,
and not only was the _editor_ one I had never touched (or would), the
language and OS were ones I had never used and never would.  It didn't
detract from what was actually being _taught_ -- which was not "how to
edit and run programs on an Apple-something-or-other".

The live examples we were shown for APL not only used a differnt
editor, OS, and virtual machine that we used, it didn't even use the
same character set!

I guess I have unealisitically high expections of modern students.

... and back then all we had were zeros!


-- 
Grant

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#94651

On Monday, July 27, 2015 at 1:15:29 AM UTC+5:30, Grant Edwards wrote:
> On 2015-07-26, Rustom Mody  wrote:
> > On Sunday, July 26, 2015 at 9:17:16 PM UTC+5:30, Grant Edwards wrote:
> >> On 2015-07-26, Rustom Mody wrote:
> >> 
> >>> JFTR: Ive been using emacs for 20+ years.  And I have the increasing
> >>> feeling that my students are getting fedup with it (and me).
> 
> [...]
> >> Why do your students even _know_ (let alone care!) what editor you
> >> use?
> >> 
> >> I admit it was years ago, but after attending three universities and
> >> getting a BS in Computer Engineering and an MS in Computer Science and
> >> Electrical Engieneering, I hadn't the foggiest idea what editors any
> >> of the faculty used.  Nor would I have cared one way or the other if I
> >> had known.
> >
> > Its 2015 now and any ½ decent teacher of programming, writes programs
> > in front of the class. And debugs and hacks and pokes around
> > OS-related stuff (ps, top and more arcane) etc. 
> 
> I still don't get it.
> 
> You're not teaching the _editor_, so why would it matter to anybody
> which editor you're using to show them the code?  They can see the
> code, and they can see what it does.  Are they too stupid to figure
> out how to insert or delete a line using whatever editor they prefer?
> 
> I remember being shown live examples in a numerical programming class,
> and not only was the _editor_ one I had never touched (or would), the
> language and OS were ones I had never used and never would.  It didn't
> detract from what was actually being _taught_ -- which was not "how to
> edit and run programs on an Apple-something-or-other".
> 
> The live examples we were shown for APL not only used a differnt
> editor, OS, and virtual machine that we used, it didn't even use the
> same character set!
> 
> I guess I have unealisitically high expections of modern students.
> 
> ... and back then all we had were zeros!

Was setting up machines for use a job you did in your days?
I know we didn't set up any -- there were no machines to set up other than the 
privately unaffordable public resources.
Today a machine is about as personal and private as a toothbrush.

DevOps is a fashionable term these days.
We used to call it system-administration.
As expected CS education is about 10 years behind the curve in seeing its
importance

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