But won't someone think of the children?

So many puns intended, and this is kinda-sorta horribly bitten tongue in horribly bitten cheek.

For how many of us was our first OS class a lesson in "denial of service" by not checking fork()'s return value? Back in the day of shared resources, that was a very, very quick and socially enforced lesson. Later on, I was a sysadmin in academia, and we knew to be ready for it.

Maybe we need "bad idea" emulation environments within which students (*cough* agents) must learn? Removing vfork+exec seems fantastic. But how do we train the N+4th generation on *why* that choice is fantastic? No programming language itself helps or else we'd all be using Pascal / Modula-{2,3,...} / Ada.

Now that I'm a bit outside education, I really worry. We already had the problem of people knowing only Matlab, and then(?) only Python... There was one student who did not understand that a textual representation of an integer was different than the different encodings. I admit that I still have great difficulty in explaining the difference without courses in architecture, programming, and applications. If you *start* with the difference, sure, it's just there. If you've gone five+ years of college-level education without ever experiencing that difference, well, I've failed to put myself in their place sufficiently to explain it well.

Sorry. Rambling.

Otherwise, I'd assume that init would remain responsible for reaping zombie children. Perhaps we also could modify the terminology?