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Ask HN: What would your reaction be? (final year undergrad. OS exam)

2 points by STajbakhsh ↗ HN
Explain in simple terms how operating systems turn the ugly into the beautiful? (2 marks)<p>I go to what the world thinks of as a "top university". This question was part of our terribly-designed final year undergraduate exam paper on Operating Systems.

9 comments

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mike_mikeson
I don't get what your objection is?

It's obviously a mini-essay question, a chance to show your opinions and reason about ideas. Seems good to me.

Do you not like it because it's not a yes-no question? Welcome to reality, where not all questions have simple answers, even in CS. That's probably why it's a top-tier university!

Whatever you do don't look at this exam paper from Cambridge - it will blow your mind http://www.phil.cam.ac.uk/u_grads/Tripos/Ethics/Past_Exams/1.... Example question "What makes death bad?"

STajbakhsh
I think my objection is mainly due to the unscientific nature of the question. A question like this that is looking at the goals of the OS is very objective and has a clear answer. I would expect a question to be worded like this in a Philosophy, Law etc. exam (like the link posted by you). In my opinion, there are some questions, even in CS, that can be open-ended and be very interesting to attempt but this certainly isn't one.
mike_mikeson
But people make technical design decisions in operating systems based on trying to make the operating system as conceptually simple as possible, which is what he means by beautiful, which I hope you would know from reading the literature.

I would relish this essay question - I would have written about the history of Unix, the evolution towards Plan 9 and why it failed. These are important issues in CS, and if you are ignorant of them you are likely to repeat them. Your professor is testing that you have understood these lessons from history.

I think you need to retract your implication that it's somehow an inherently bad or embarrassing choice for a question.

All you have left is that you are fundamentally opposed to any philosophical, historical or human factor thinking in CS, and I don't think that's a supportable position.

STajbakhsh
Those are interesting points and luckily I am aware of them. I quite like the angle at which you're looking at this; it made me think again.
mike_mikeson
We should be very very thankful for these questions. They differentiate the people that have really read around and understand what it is that we're doing in CS, and those that have just been to the lectures.
pizza
slightly off topic, but there are a number of people who'd be inclined to say that very few observations, if any at all, are objective.
stray
My reaction?

I suppose my reaction would be to answer the question.

JustARandomGuy
One of the most important parts about an undergraduate degree is that it's a foundation for knowledge, not narrowly focused on one particular topic. That's why gen-eds exist.

Anyway, had I received this question on a test, I would have started with a discussion of the command line and how powerful it is (i.e. the "ugly") and compare/contrast it with UIs (i.e. the "beautiful"; start with Win 95 and continue on to Win 7/8, Mac OSX, etc).

I'd throw in references to Spolsky's famous adage about "all abstractions are leaky" - i.e. you could discuss how UIs are beautiful, yet the command line (ugly) is where the power exists. There's at least 2-3 pages of content in that alone.

I'd end with how UIs brought the power of computing to the common man - learning to use the command line is difficult (esp for the elderly, the young, the mentally-challenged), but pasting a UI on top allows even the most computer-illiterate to work. Add in some discussion on the desktop metaphor and you're done.

STajbakhsh
That's definitely a thorough way of approaching this but from an examination point of view, bear in mind that there are 98 other marks to be answered.