On Saturday I attended an "open source" event in Fukuoka, western Japan. I visited the booth of an organization named LinuC which conducts exams and issues certificates to those who pass.
I had glanced through at one of the textbooks they recommend. It said that Linux started in 1991. It did not make clear that the Linux kernel was built upon existing GNU software. I pointed out that "Linux", strictly speaking, is just the kernel and different from what is commonly referred to "Linux." This remark made the booth attendant visibly uncomfortable: he started wading and gasping for air. He was troubled because when things are presented this way, the shallowness of one's understanding of crucial system components becomes impossible to disguise. Ironically it is the knowledge of these very components which lie outside the kernel that examinations like LinuC measure. I had noticed that their textbook mentions neither sed nor awk. It is hard for me to envision someone claiming UNIX proficiency with no experience with sed and awk. Opening the Software Toolbox by Arnold Robbins https://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/manual/html_node/Opening-the-software-toolbox.html How well one understands the above document, I believe, is a good measure of UNIX proficiency. Awk is not discussed in depth here, but if you wish to solve real-life problems with this approach, you need it. One who adheres to the "It all started with one email in 1991" story lacks a firm grasp of the operating system. And people with this level of understanding are making decisions on what is important and what is not in "Linux." I understand that Richard Stallman wants students to learn Lisp using GNU and Emacs as the working environment. On the other hand he is along with Arnold Robbins an original author of GNU Awk.
