Re: meta question about learning Unix, PATH, HOME, and ~

On Sun, 25 Jun 2006 08:41:29 +0100, NM Public wrote:

>     > <rant mode on>
[...]
 
> I have a question about why you, Beartooth or anyone watching, 
> wants to learn Unix/Linux/*nix. 

Fair comment! My apologies for the length of what follows.

> I also studied mathematics, especially set theory & logic, 

I thought so! (Among other things, I took WV Quine's advanced course in
symbolic logic, and got through maybe half of Kleene on metamath; always
wanted to get back to that.)

> and the reason I like Unix is similar to the reason I like math, namely
> there's a purity and a beauty to building very powerful things out of
> very simple building blocks. 

Yes! I took a real variables course that expounded the Peano Postulates,
jumped back, and proceeded to *build* the whole real number system --
pulling it out of the empty set like a rabbit out of no hat : glorious,
simply glorious! What less can you assume than an empty set??

What stopped me at last was the recognition hat I resembled a Viennese
barber in Mozart's time: I have intense appreciation, but no ability to
sing -- i.e., solve problems, and delight in doing it -- much less compose
(discover/create new proofs). And I had gotten too spoiled to live with
that -- absorbed and metabolized Hardy's attitude.

> I do not have a problem reading most man pages so it is hard for me to
> relate to your man page ranting above Beartooth. I think that my years
> of careful reading of very terse mathematics was excellent preparation
> for man page reading!

Mine are probably what saves me. (See quasi-footnote on absence of
problem at bottom of this)

> Anyway, I'm not saying that you should be able to, or want to, 
> read man pages. What I'm wondering is *why* are you trying to 
> learn this stuff? If I can understand that, it might help me to 
> help you reach your goals. For example, maybe the solution is 
> for you to use a different operating system or to quit using the 
> command line. I'm not saying that that's the solution, I'm just 
> trying to understand why you are torturing yourself with the 
> Unix command-line world.

Well, for my part, the command line is a lot like the math problems that
used to delight me at such times as I did manage to do them. But what's
left of my memory is jammed with other things; and the visual part works a
lot better than the verbal.(For one thing, having become a historian of
literature and of tongues, I never feel like I know a word any more till I
know all its relatives and their shared history -- etymology,
exemplification of major and familiar patters of change in both sound and
meaning, etc. Commands don't have that, afaict, and the lack makes them
seem lifeless to me.)

I would like nothing better than to learn linux *right* (and maybe I
could, eventually); but given all the other things I want to do, and my
estimate of the time I have left, it seems to me the best compromise is to
learn to use it the way a good driver uses a car on snow, or a squash
player swings a racquet. So I do things by command line insofar as
feasible, and that does progress, albeit slowly.  

I can type things like /sbin/ifconfig (not always accurately the first
time, but without looking anything up) when what I want to know is what
final number to put into 192.168.x.y in an scp command; but I go look in
the GUI representation of /home/btth on each machine as often as I do at
an ls command -- especially when I'm moving pix around, or want something
out of a sub-sub-sub-folder -- and I check the scp man page, and grit my
teeth, and still usually formulate the command wrong, or too fully, or
both, the first time, and have to try again.

The first real computer I ever got (at work, after years on a dumb
terminal) ran OS/2 -- and I did my email by telnetting to an AIX machine
in the basement that ran Pine (ca. 3.0, iirc -- it must have been
about 1992). I had to find out by guess and intuition what a shell was,
and what it was good for -- not that I found out much ...

W95 (when the whole agency switched OSs) was detestable after OS/2, and
W98 (which was all I could walk out of a store with when I retired)
was a lot worse. 

So the first criterion for an OS for me is that it NOT BE M$; the second,
after giving OSX a long hard try, is NOT APPLE (which many *think*
intuitive, because it's *second* nature to them). It's *counter*-intuitive
to both my wife and me, and still more so to a New Mexico friend who
retired from being a BSD honcho, and to one here who's no geek but a
pathologist; he once had to use Apple for years. He runs M$ now, just
because it's not Apple.

When I retired and looked for an OS to replace W98, it seemed plain not
just that linux was the coming thing (and RedHat the most widespread
distro), but also the one it would be easiest to find extensive help for
online. Both those things seem to me to have been reasonably good
judgments. (I had a look at synaptic a few years back, and at Ubuntu last
month, and found them irritating -- as I do KDE, for that matter.)

There are certainly times when I wish I could write shell scripts
-- such as yesterday, for instance, when I wanted a command or two
that would grab every message in every folder I ever filed anything in
from the novalug list, get it onto my own machine for safety, and then
delete it from titan, in order to have a really clean start from which to
do everything over. 

My remnant mathematical intuition gives me vivid appreciation of things
like nesting and recursion -- and I use such commands with glee, when
somebody on some list formulates one for me, or better yet tells me it's
already canned and has a name. (I have read man ssh, for
instance, especially the scp part, several times, though I'm not yet solid
on it.)

I don't think I'm likely to reach that level, coming from where I am.
But, just to clarify the point of the rant, what I really want is a
conceptual framework for linux. 

Example: despite having been harried through all the crank-grinding in
Peirce, I never began to feel like I *understood* the calculus, let alone
why it worked, till I took set topology. Then and only then I got a grasp
of neighborhoods, limits, et hoc genus omne.

               *****           *****             *****

Quasi-footnote : 

One other thought that often moves me is a discovery that surprised me at
my last job. Even though I was an absolute peon, the Alpha Plus Technoids
in my directorate and (rarely) even IT sometimes came to *me* with
questions. 

It turned out I could articulate better than most what the problems and
hindrances were that other peons had with the current version of whatever
-- things so elementary that they themselves could no longer imagine not
knowing them. 

So I do that often still -- among other things in the man page rant --
because it's the one thing I know that *I* can do relatively well to help
linux develop, and I owe it all the return favors I can think of. 

This favor, I hope and expect, will grow in value exponentially quite
soon, when the wave of retiring Baby Boomers gets liberated from M$ and
some small portion of their vast numbers wants the things linux can give
-- wants them badly enough to make a serious effort, but isn't willing to
spend years learning from the ground up, and lived too early to get the
broad grasp that today's young people have, bless themOnce again, my
apologies for length of rant.!

> Looking forward to Beartooth and others response to this,
> Nancy

Well, you asked for it! Once again, my apologies for length of rant.
<sheepish grin>

Goethe himself somewhere opens a message with the words (in my
translation), "I send you this long letter, because I don't have time to
write you a short one."

-- 
Beartooth Staffwright, Wordcrafty Squirreler
FC5; Pine 4.64, Pan 0.14.2.91; Privoxy 3.0.3; CXO 5.0.1
Dillo 0.8.5, Opera 9.0, Firefox 1.5, Galeon 2.0.1
Remember I have little (precious little) idea what I am talking about.