This is a tough lesson and for many the only teacher is experience. For the longest time I avoided what I considered abstract math, despite the general wisdom of its importance to computer science. I spent weeks writing software that could predict customer complaints based on supplier action. Given the first three days of complaints following an action, I could reliably predict the total number of complaints a year into the future. I proudly showed one of my coworkers, who didn't have the aversion to math that I did, he informed me that I just reinvented poisson linear regression. I learned my lesson that day. This guy will likely figure it out after a couple of tries as well :)

Have you read the Unix Haters Handbook?

http://web.mit.edu/~simsong/www/ugh.pdf

I hadn't, looks like an hour of two of amusement.

While there are some occasional good points that could be converted in to solutions, I can't help but think that this book is more amusement than actual constructive criticisms well packaged.

It's a collection of some of the best rants from the Unix Haters mailing list that existed in the late eighties/early nineties. The people that were on the list usually had experience with operating systems that were more advanced than Unix. Constructive criticism was never really the point of the mailing list.

My point was that the parent's suggestion that anyone who criticizes Unix obviously isn't smart enough to understand it is just flat out wrong and offensive.

> the parent's suggestion that anyone who criticizes Unix obviously isn't smart enough to understand it

That wasn't what I was saying at all. But thanks for playing.