[TUHS] Anyone ever heard of teaching a case study of Initial Unix?

[Marc Donner]

There have been case study courses here and there over the years.  I would
argue that Lyons’s book of sources was the text for one.  An old crony, Ed
Smith, used to teach a comparative programming languages course back in the
day.  And I know someone at NYU taught a course where people studied the
source code of a variety of utilities.

=====
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On Wed, Jul 3, 2024 at 11:27 AM Vincenzo Nicosia <katolaz at freaknet.org>
wrote:

> On Wed, Jul 03, 2024 at 02:51:01PM +1000, sjenkin at canb.auug.org.au wrote:
> > I???ve never heard of a Computer Science or Software Engineering program
> > that included a ???case study??? component, especially for Software
> Development & Projects.
> >
> > MBA programs feature an emphasis on real-world ???case studies???, to
> learn from successes & failures,
> > to give students the possibility of not falling into the same traps.
> >
> > Creating Unix V6, because it profoundly changed computing & development,
> > would seem an obvious Case Study for many aspects of Software, Coding
> and Projects.
> >
>
> I personally believe that the comparison of "mainstream" software
> development principles and the birth and development of projects like
> Unix, Linux, or any other major successful free software project is
> fundamentally flawed.
>
> The programmers considered as "fungible workforce" by mainstream
> software engineering and project management theories are *paid* to to
> their programming job, and they mostly have to carry that job over
> working on prescribed objectives and timelines which have been decided
> by somebody else, managers who know nothing at all about software
> development. Personal interest in the project, passion, motivation,
> curiosity, creative power, sense of beauty, the joy of belonging to a
> community of likeminded people, are never part of the equation, at any
> point.
>
> Remove one of those latter ingredients from Unix, Linux, or any other
> major successful free/open source software project, and that project
> would have not existed, at all.
>
> I think it would be terribly misleading to teach young CS students that
> software projects should be managed "as Unix v6 came to life". They will
> never, ever find anything even close to that environment in a
> professional workplace. We should tell them that some of the most
> beautiful software projects ever crafted by humans did not come out of
> the "professionalism churches" that the overwhelming majority of
> software companies are nowadays, based on  the blind application of
> "mainstream" software development and project management principles,
> according to which they (the CS majors) are just "as fungible and
> replaceable as a chair, or a wallpaper". That would be only true and
> fair to tell them.
>
> I don't know if that would be of any avail to them, but at least we do
> not mislead them in thinking that their paid programming time will
> actually change the world in any meaningful way.....
>
> My2cents
>
> Enzo Nicosia
>
> --
>
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