It's great pedagogically because the kernel is simple, well-architected, and excellent for undergrads to work with. Historically, academic UNIX has been tremendously useful for development of new concepts, as well as teaching the next generation.
Some notes of interest: 1) all-around genius Russ Cox is one of the developers and teacher for the course. 2) another teacher is Robert Morris Jr, who developed the sendmail worm back in the day. He is now a professor at MIT.
notorandit•5h ago
IMHO any wannabe programmer should spend some time here to fully grasp core concepts and not just high level stuff.