Helping my students overcome command-line bullshittery (2014) • Hacker News Board

Re: Helping my students overcome command-line bullshittery (2014)

#41

Post by zobzu » Tue, Nov 03, 2015, 2:47 AM UTC

"nohup tar -jxvf giant.tar.bz2 2> cmd.errs &”

Someone doesn't know how things work and is complaining about it. The above command is just programs put together in hope that it looks complicated, but are also totally useless, and not actually installing anything (it unbzip an archive, detach it from the controlly TTY, redirects errors to a file, and run in the background, while verbosely writing down what it does, because, nobody knows why anyway)

I don't find most-programs CLI all that bad - in fact, its more consistent than the GUI stuff with some exceptions (generally coded by people like the author, an many java-based programs, mind you, go figure, etc.).

Sure, I'd like to say "hey make everything works" and the computer does it for me. But until them things like "yum install blahsoftware" is REALLY fast an easy (heck it beats the phone apps stores by such magnitudes that I can't even?) It's 3 words. Done.

Heck, you want to install a full software suite, configured, with services auto deployed etc? Today you can also do this also in 3 to 6 fucking words. That's amazing if you ask me.

Re: Helping my students overcome command-line bullshittery (2014)

#42

Post by dfc » Tue, Nov 03, 2015, 2:48 AM UTC

32bitkid wrote: post #23

While I completely agree with the gist and point of the the article, the word "bullshittery" is a bit over-the-top. I grew up in the suburbs of Detroit and in middle school and high school there was an abudance of shop classes; wood shop, metal shop, electronics, auto shop. In first-year wood shop, we started out with a little coping saw and a file and made golf tee holders and bird houses out of soft pine. After a w…

I had the same response. I can't imagine hearing a carpenter go on and on with "Its absurd that i have to set the depth of my dadoes. Its so hard to be me and have to sharpen my chisels. Someone like me should not have to set the depth of my planes or adjust the width of the opening. Damn you Lie and Neilsen you are ruining my brilliance. If thats not enough I have to constantly explain these things to these wretched apprentices that are always bothering me." It sounds like entitled whining to me. It is a job, not a recreational activity. Soldiers have to clean their rifles and ballerinas need to break in their ballet shoes. I have to imagine that even individuals at the pinnacle of their professions occasionally have to deal with things they would rather avoid.

Re: Helping my students overcome command-line bullshittery (2014)

#43

Post by wh-uws » Tue, Nov 03, 2015, 2:49 AM UTC

Obligatory xkcd link

https://xkcd.com/1168/

Re: Helping my students overcome command-line bullshittery (2014)

#44

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Nov 03, 2015, 2:49 AM UTC

irisyao wrote: post #38

etrain wrote: post #17

I'm a researcher in the same basic field, and I too am pretty good at this "bullshittery." However, Philip trivializes the "10,000 hours" spent learning this stuff as merely learning how to cope with this interface. This is so far off it hurts. Those countless hours spent messing with free software is how I learned to use other people's work, compile it, read it, fix bugs in it, and learn how other people think and w…

I'm also a researcher in the same basic field but not that good at this "bullshittery".

[deleted]

Re: Helping my students overcome command-line bullshittery (2014)

#45

Post by rsync » Tue, Nov 03, 2015, 2:50 AM UTC

Frankly, I appreciate a good bottleneck that selects against people that can't grok basic unix admin and system maintenance.

How many hours (thousands) and dollars (tens of thousands) have I wasted on "programmers" that don't even have a home server running in their closet...

That's an interview question at rsync.net, btw. What computer(s) do you have (running) in your closet ? What computer is connected to your television ?

Re: Helping my students overcome command-line bullshittery (2014)

#46

Post by Daneel_ » Tue, Nov 03, 2015, 2:50 AM UTC

opnitro wrote: post #26

tormeh wrote: post #6

I like the same author's "The Two Cultures of Computing"[0]. It's somewhat in the same vein, and also really important. 0: http://www.pgbovine.net/two-cultures-of-computing.htm

I've always had people who wanted to learn programming become so bogged down in the tools around programming. It led me to thinking that it might be better to teach the fundamentals with pen/paper/whiteboard. To get the "this is why programming is important/powerful" message across. Anyone tried this/had any success with it?

I've done this in a non-professional environment to allow my partner to understand what I do.

We used a whiteboard to draw a flowchart of the logical steps needed to make Tetris work, then wrote pseudocode for those modules.

Re: Helping my students overcome command-line bullshittery (2014)

#47

Post by Estragon » Tue, Nov 03, 2015, 2:50 AM UTC

anigbrowl wrote: post #21

Can't upvote this enough, and I urge people also to read his other article on this topic, as well as the rebuttal linked within. I got into computers in the early 1980s when built-in BASIC interpreters were considered Terribly Clever and graphics were something you got by loading/constructing an alternate character set to fit on the text grid. Like many others I stumbled onwards through Vax terminals and onto PCs, wh…

> Back around 1999 I was running Gnome and E.16 (or was it 15?) and I had a hugely customizable UI

Why don't you keep using it? I'm still using sawfish.

Re: Helping my students overcome command-line bullshittery (2014)

#48

Post by wfo » Tue, Nov 03, 2015, 2:51 AM UTC

tormeh wrote: post #30

wfo wrote: post #18

Honestly it comes down to whether or not you want to understand how something really works. If you are 99% of users then someone has pre-anticipated everything you will ever do with a computer and so there are nice pretty GUI tools to do whatever you want to do that someone has worked very hard and possibly been paid a great deal of money to create to make your life easier. If you are going to be building things or p…

The command-line is also an abstraction. I'm not anti-command line (for non-user stuff), but it irks me that we see the command line as some kind of god-given fundamental bloc, rather than just another abstraction that just happen to be at a level most programmers are happy with. I think the command line will persist as long as keyboards are the primary data entry tool, but nothing makes the command line inherently l…

The command line isn't an abstraction: a particular shell is, sure. Directly inputting machine instructions is a form of a command line. At its most basic the computer is executing an ordered sequence of commands and you need a way to tell it to execute the commands you wish. Machines run on a sequence of function-argument instructions -- this is fundamentally what the command line is. I suppose you could invent a GUI that lets you click on the opcodes and memory addresses you want to execute but that's bordering on silly. It's always going to be very awkward to capture fundamental computation with a GUI unless the way the machines work changes in a big way.

Every machine in existence has a command line interface. Some of them have GUIs built on top of that. Sounds pretty fundamental to me.

Re: Helping my students overcome command-line bullshittery (2014)

#49

Post by ZanyProgrammer » Tue, Nov 03, 2015, 2:51 AM UTC

rsync wrote: post #45

Frankly, I appreciate a good bottleneck that selects against people that can't grok basic unix admin and system maintenance. How many hours (thousands) and dollars (tens of thousands) have I wasted on "programmers" that don't even have a home server running in their closet... That's an interview question at rsync.net, btw. What computer(s) do you have (running) in your closet ? What computer is connected to your tele…

I can't tell if you're being serious, but thank god people succeed in programming despite people like you if you are serious.

Re: Helping my students overcome command-line bullshittery (2014)

#50

Post by tolmasky » Tue, Nov 03, 2015, 2:52 AM UTC

This was one of the big reasons we made https://tonicdev.com . We found so many stackoverflow questions were just about installing packages or asking how to get node running on their computer. We wanted a way to be able to try just about anything in the environment without starting with the most demoralizing part -- configuration and installation.