[flukus]

Yeah, I did Pascal in high school too, but I thought x01 were college designations, we don't use them here.

Actually, I've been brushing up on my awk lately and it seems like it might be a good candidate for those not on the CS track.

It teaches/requires the command line. It has a built in loop (great for fast feedback). It's a decent enough language. And I'd argue it and the rest of unix tools are probably more worthwhile than any general purpose language, they're brilliant for data wrangling.

[btschaegg]

> I thought x01 were college designations, we don't use them here.

As I said, this is properly a terminology question. I can't speak from experience for the american naming scheme, and where I live, much of it has been "rehashed" in different institutions.

Does that mean that you have noone at the beginning of a CS degree that can't program yet? We certainly hat a good bunch of them.

As for UNIX tools: Absolutely. I've never gotten around to learn awk properly (and never had any need to), but having experience in bash (and other shells) in combination with the GNU tools has had countless benefits for me so far.

Do you have any preference for introduction material for awk?

Edit:

When it comes to data processing, I also really like what projects like pandas are doing:

https://pypi.python.org/pypi/pandas

[flukus]

> Does that mean that you have noone at the beginning of a CS degree that can't program yet? We certainly hat a good bunch of them.

I don't think our school was very typical, it was a fairly poor public school, I suspect it was taught because there was a sepecific teacher that wanted to teach it. It was being run from the commerce department at the time, with half the time spent in the graphic design class rooms (they only ones with computers). This was in the late 90's when they were still teaching us touch typing on electronic typewriters. It does seem like a huge waste for students to start a CS degree without experience though, a good portion of them will never have any aptitude for it.

> Do you have any preference for introduction material for awk?

I've been going through O'Reilly's "Sed & Awk" that was sold as part of a unix bundle a while ago. I haven't done much at all, though it has simplified monitoring things at work, like coloring log files reading from log files to tell us how many and how long a particular set of processes are taking.