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The Unix Pipe Card Game

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Re: The Unix Pipe Card Game

#31

Post by pmontra »

CBarkleyU wrote: post #18
g4zj wrote: post #6

Are kids these days actually able to grasp things like this? I don't have kids and am never around them, so please take this question as genuine and in good faith.

Not sure about kids, but I've seen university students that literally did not know how to use a non iOS computing device. Colleagues had to start explaining what a file is, a folder, etc etc, in their courses. Honestly I don't find that too bad. My guess is that computers will go the same way cars did: Most people will only know the very basics that are needed to operate the thing. Any deeper knowledge will be left t…

A good developer I've been working with years ago told me "I really don't know how networking works [and SQL] but... I studied Graphic Design, not CS. While I was studying that I realized that I liked programming more than design so I started doing it and never got a formal education about computer stuff." He was really good at Node and he ended up being the lead developer of the company he was working for. I know good developers coming from all sort of backgrounds, from Philosophy to Agrarian science (if that's the right English term for that.)

Re: The Unix Pipe Card Game

#32

Post by pmontra »

jtsuken wrote: post #29
qingcharles wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The first class of my CS degree was "How to use Microsoft Word" and some of the other students had a really, really hard time figuring this out. Including the guy next to me who kept telling me he had a job lined up already to write software for nuclear reactors in Pascal.

There was a post on HN some time ago about a candidate for a senior IT role, who wrote code in MS Word. I can't find it right now. Maybe I should try Bing search

Great fun with the autocorrected Unicode double quotes.

A customer of mine got bitten on a preproduction server because of a copy and paste from some blog, where ASCII " were converted to Unicode (slanted) "

Re: The Unix Pipe Card Game

#33

Post by floodle »

elchief wrote: post #4

$19 shipping (Canada) is a little outrageous anybody in Greater Vancouver wanna do a bulk order w me?

It's a wild idea to take a completely digital asset, print it in Europe on to paper, and then put it on a ship and slowly transport it to Canada.

Re: The Unix Pipe Card Game

#35

Post by DonHopkins »

koolba wrote: post #21
throwaway71271 wrote: post #3

I make those decks ( https://punkx.org/ ) to help me teach my daughter, and so far they seem very effective, especially the unix pipes one and the 4917 machine code https://punkx.org/4917/ and the pointers deck https://punkx.org/c-pointer-game/ , from the python deck I use only 10 cards or so btw, you might also like https://punkx.org/overflow/ which is a buffer overflow riscv assembly board game, or depending on you…

What age and how much terminal familiarity did you start playing?

[flagged]

Re: The Unix Pipe Card Game

#39

Post by nilamo »

qingcharles wrote: post #27
throwaway71271 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> what a file is What is a file, what is a program, how programs run and how programs communicate, is not understood by most people (including most CS students). > Honestly I don't find that too bad. I understand what you mean, it is the same with most technology, users just use it, as your example of cars, or even furniture, or forks and spoons, or language, I am not even sure it is related to complexity. But I disa…

The first class of my CS degree was "How to use Microsoft Word" and some of the other students had a really, really hard time figuring this out. Including the guy next to me who kept telling me he had a job lined up already to write software for nuclear reactors in Pascal.

Why would using a fancy editor be in any way relevant to writing code? That CS class should be dropped from the curriculum, imo, until such time as bolding a register has some sort of meaning, or perhaps viewing an sql table via "print preview".

Re: The Unix Pipe Card Game

#40

Post by Suppafly »

grayfaced wrote: post #26
oliwarner wrote: post #12

Great until you play a minimal game with somebody who grew up on awk, perl, etc

Yea that's the fault of the scoring method (Count pipes). Character count would be better... either that or play within the spirit of the game and learn the tools for their intended purpose. I use a lot of awk/sed for quick one-time processing and I use a similar mental model for how I do most of my processing. Build a input stream, use sed to structure the data into records, use awk to process records, massage the o…

> In many cases I could use sed or awk to replace each other

I always felt that way too. I don't do a ton of command line processing of stuff now, but got pretty proficient with them back in day specifically for a unix class in college. A lot of the seemingly simple command line tools have overlapping feature sets or can be coerced into doing extra stuff.

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