I’m not sure - I took an operating systems course in C that used command line only for submissions, and of course if you didn’t run a *nix locally you had to SSH in and work in a terminal environment for the entire course. This was three years ago. You could nitpick about what “non-trivial” means, but I’d say most CS degrees require some non-trivial work(to them).
Just because they have experience in C and (hopefully) some non trivial work over the course of the entire degree doesn’t mean they have non trivial experience in C.
I’d love to hear what the author considers nontrivial but I’m going to guess it has something to do with pointers, and familiarity more generally with the memory model of C.
Yeah I guess it’s the non-trivial bit that needs clarification. My son shelled into nix systems and wrote some c++ code that made system calls. It’s just the way the prereq was written leads me to believe a good portion of his time in this class would be spent on learning things ancillary to the main content.
Honing in on what is meant by "non-trivial" is a good point, because it will really mean different things when talking about different audiences.
I took a few undergrad CS courses during some downtime recently and found them blindingly, disappointingly easy to the point where I found myself fading the (prestigious) school that created the material. They felt completely trivial, as did the assignments.
On the other hand, I'd be willing to entertain the argument that I've not yet written a non-trivial program in my ~10 years working.
