@Clueless_Luser said:
I'm well aware that day jobs will frequently mandate painful, obtuse and/or suboptimal development environments (in fact, I've worked at places that did this). However, in this case, I'm not a paid employee, but rather a paying customer, and as such, I feel I should be able to request platform-agnosticism and get it.
Sorry, paying tuition doesn't mean you get any input on the syllabus. You can of course suggest things to your professor, but he is under no obligation to include them.
Just curious: how many students are in your course? Do you expect your professor to cater to every student's whims and wants?
@Clueless_Luser said:
As I stated before, I believe that if one is going to grade CS homework, one really should understand how to use the standard command line tools as they really do represent a least-common denominator between disparate machine types.
And I believe that if one is going to do CS homework, then one should make life as simple as possible for the grader. Despite what your professor said, you don't necessarily know that the grader can't use command-line tools; you only know that they aren't using them for the purposes of this course. Again, expecting the grader to sort out X disparate submissions, where X is the number of students in the class, is unreasonable. Graders don't get paid enough to deal with that kind of crap.
Have you ever been a grader or an instructor for a computer science class? Try thinking about the problem from their perspective rather than only your own.