Wow, it’s been a really long time since I haven’t written this down. On installing operating systems. How do you do it? That depends on the operating system. What holds consistently across all operating systems, though, is that the number of steps to do so is subject to vary. At first, the process was simple. It only involved a small handful of steps. But then as the software involved got more complicated, the steps increased to a point where people developed automated installers to help them out. Yet, here’s an even more subtle point. What do you do when you’re just before the point where you should develop an automated installer? Do you create the automation system, or do you push on, just doing one more step manually? This is a really hard question to answer. It is even harder when you try to put a beginner in this position. Oh, they weren’t considering beginners. Or oh, yeah, they’d like to develop an automated installer, but it’s easier to just type the commands manually one more time than to develop the automation system. Or maybe they really want to understand how the system works internally, and to do so, they prefer to do more steps manually.
It depends on how rapidly they want to grow their community. If they are not anticipating community growth, then the commands will remain long and baroque. Plus, there will be very little in the way of documentation. If they can barely afford one techie, and that one techie manages to work in that environment, that’s all that matters, the cheap do-getters say. And going cheap economically sometimes makes sense, they say. Yes it does.
Problems with teaching programming languages. These happen to be the same problems facing the teaching of human languages too. Popularity politics. Spanish is a more marketable language, they say. That’s why they teach Spanish and not something else like Chinese, Japanese, Korean, or Vietnamese. CJKV, as those in the community like to say.
They teach Java because it’s the most popular. But it’s not the best, it turns out. It’s alright, but other programming languages are better. Let’s go over why this is. Interface complexity, for the most part.
Oh, that’s nothing new. Are new things good things? That is the question. Nontraditional?