Why are programing students having a hard time setting up thier environments? Shouldn't they have taken some OS 101 classes? At least know how to install software? I never went to college, but I assumed they would get you proficient in prerequisites first..
> I never went to college
I did ... the thing is, most college students need a lot of help, especially in earlier classes. On a statistical level it's somewhat the opposite of a population of self-taught programmers, who self-select for being into the gritty details of computer systems, and being able to figure stuff out. You know, in most college tracks, there are problems with lots of students needing help, cheating, struggling, it's kinda the regular state of things, now that most people go to college.
Some college students switch to something else later; some continue to need lots of help with system setup when they start working professionally; those who are really good were largely self-taught either before or between college courses. College/university is still useful for the self-taught programmer, to cover gaps, and for the advanced courses. I had been installing, configuring, fixing, and re-installing windows and linux for 4+ years before university, and I really loved my systems programming courses.
Now that there are millions of programmers out there in the world, working professionally, yeah lots of them are kinda useless ... there's a reason why "average" doesn't have a great connotation.
You're thinking far too much in traditional colleges, and also I personally didn't have an os 101 course at my college. The only time we talked operating systems was how they worked at the kernel/system level. Schedulers bootloader forking shared memory etc.
The author is more for the use case of 'hey I have a full time job and want to change careers to programming, how could I get started?' or 'i couldn't get into college even if I could afford it because that's just not a path my community is set up for, but I'm motivated and want to learn programming anyway'
Zed's courses are, afaik, targeted at absolute beginners. The exact folks who have the most problems setting up environments.
That said, programming for over 20 years and I still sometimes have problems w/ environments, so... yeah.
I've never seen an OS 101 course offered.
And how would that course work if every one had a aligytly different laptop with different OS versions?
My school did. But that was back when nobody was expected to have a laptop, and the labs were on getting used to the school's Solaris computer environment and the UNIX command line, with assignments on using grep, tail, sed, awk, etc. Probably half the class had only ever used Windows before.
Setting env can be tricky as fuck