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I Raised My Kids On the Command Line and They Love It (2012)

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Re: I Raised My Kids On the Command Line and They Love It (2012)

#21

I've heard of being raised on the bread line, or the poverty line, but the command line? That's real deprivation. Imagine how excited they will be when they learn about hot water and inside toilets. More seriously, what can a 2-5 year old do on the command line that would interest them? I'm genuinely curious.

When you're 5 everything novel in your environment is basically like magic. So being as the command line pretty much is the closest thing we have to actual magic spells anyway, it's going to be useful for them to encounter this fact early on, while they still find it easy to accept.

Re: I Raised My Kids On the Command Line and They Love It (2012)

#23
post #15

I raised my kids on GUIs and they love it. (I don't disagree that exposing kids to the command line is probably a valuable thing, but the idea that kids who learned to type a magic command to launch games on C64 have more useful knowledge than kids brought up on Mac/Windows is frankly stupid.) Last night my five-year-old daughter complained her iPad was out of battery so I gave her my Nexus 7 and she had no problems…

>the idea that kids who learned to type a magic command to launch games on C64 have more useful knowledge than kids brought up on Mac/Windows is frankly stupid. >children that used Commodores or TRS-80s or DOS knew a lot more about how their computers worked, on average, than those of the same age that use Windows or MacOS He said they know more about how their computer works, not that they have more useful knowledge…

I would. How does typing in the program name instead of clicking on a button teach you more about how a computer works? Maybe the kid might get more interested in computers, but it won't be from using the command line to run a program.

In the end the kid just wanted to play with tuxpaint.

Re: I Raised My Kids On the Command Line and They Love It (2012)

#24

I raised my kids on GUIs and they love it. (I don't disagree that exposing kids to the command line is probably a valuable thing, but the idea that kids who learned to type a magic command to launch games on C64 have more useful knowledge than kids brought up on Mac/Windows is frankly stupid.) Last night my five-year-old daughter complained her iPad was out of battery so I gave her my Nexus 7 and she had no problems…

congrats, you shielded them from knowledge and managed to kill their curiosity.

What a stupid thing to say about someone you do not know.

Re: I Raised My Kids On the Command Line and They Love It (2012)

#25
post #15

I raised my kids on GUIs and they love it. (I don't disagree that exposing kids to the command line is probably a valuable thing, but the idea that kids who learned to type a magic command to launch games on C64 have more useful knowledge than kids brought up on Mac/Windows is frankly stupid.) Last night my five-year-old daughter complained her iPad was out of battery so I gave her my Nexus 7 and she had no problems…

>the idea that kids who learned to type a magic command to launch games on C64 have more useful knowledge than kids brought up on Mac/Windows is frankly stupid. >children that used Commodores or TRS-80s or DOS knew a lot more about how their computers worked, on average, than those of the same age that use Windows or MacOS He said they know more about how their computer works, not that they have more useful knowledge…

I would disagree. The command line is really no more about "how their computer works" than a GUI is. They're both interfaces to run programs. In each you can navigate to a location on a filesystem (which is, itself, an abstraction on top of how the computer is really working) and run programs. Perhaps people who don't understand computers think that the command line is really how computers work, and that interacting with the command line inherently makes them more knowledgeable, but that's completely wrong. You understand no more by parroting apt-get install than you do by double clicking on a .deb icon.

Re: I Raised My Kids On the Command Line and They Love It (2012)

#27
Do other fun things as well.. like say, play prince or blood or lion king. Growing up playing these games along with mspaint and pinball, formatting c drive couple if times made up my childhood.

And due to having a computer early in my life, I turned out to be more technically "aware" than most of my peers.

Now the important thing for me was having that curiosity. Leave them curious for more. :)

Re: I Raised My Kids On the Command Line and They Love It (2012)

#28

I raised my kids on GUIs and they love it. (I don't disagree that exposing kids to the command line is probably a valuable thing, but the idea that kids who learned to type a magic command to launch games on C64 have more useful knowledge than kids brought up on Mac/Windows is frankly stupid.) Last night my five-year-old daughter complained her iPad was out of battery so I gave her my Nexus 7 and she had no problems…

congrats, you shielded them from knowledge and managed to kill their curiosity.

Ah, you must've learned how to weld a piece of steel before you used a car - for the sake of curiosity, of course.

Re: I Raised My Kids On the Command Line and They Love It (2012)

#29
When I was a kid, my dad knowing I could not read, made for me single-letter .BAT scripts to launch whatever I wanted on the DOS.

When a new game was installed, I would go ask him: "how I launch that game where you push boxes? (sokoban)" and he would say: "oh, press D, as in 'Dog'"

And that way, he taught me the letters.

Later, I then figured that those single letter commands were made by my dad, and I wanted to learn how to make them too!

Before I learned how to read or write, I learned CD and DIR...

As result eventually, I wanted to learn how to read and write, so I could make my own programs.

When I got good enough at making my own programs, my dad introduced me to GWBASIC. I was 6 years old then.

I still have a liking for CLI... I am now working on a OSX, it has two terminal windows open.

On windows I rarely use shortcuts, I launch everything for the "execute" thing, typing the path of whatever I want. Also when I have network issues I fix them with CMD.

When I learned how to use AutoCAD (my dad is civil engineer) I also preferred keyboard over mouse, it was much faster with few exceptions.

I think that kids raising on GUIs maybe will lose something, skip learning some interesting things.

Re: I Raised My Kids On the Command Line and They Love It (2012)

#30
post #9

I'm gonna teach my future kids how to use a word processor, then they will know something no one else does.

I'm going to make sure they only use Word Perfect 5.1 without the help of the F-key stickers.

I was not trying to be sarcastic. If I manage to teach them how a word processor is supposed to be used, then and only then can we go over to the shell.
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