R. Clayton (rclayton@monmouth.edu)
(no date)
I've changed my mind: there will be a final exam in this class. It's a
take-home essay, no more than 500 words.
The following is from a Joel Spolsky's review of Eric Raymond's The Art of Unix
Programming (http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Biculturalism.html):
By now, Windows and Unix are functionally more similar than different. They
both support the same major programming metaphors, from command lines to GUIs
to web servers; they are organized around virtually the same panoply of
system resources, from nearly identical file systems to memory to sockets and
processes and threads. There's not much about the core set of services
provided by each operating system to limit the kinds of applications you can
create.
This, as we used to say down south, is pure-d bull. Give three reasons
why. (Hint: look at the system-call interface.)
Extra credit, an extra 500 words maximum: describe a world-view in which the
paragraph above makes sense, if only in the most vaguest way.
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