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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)

#51

Post by tzs »

Tloewald wrote: post #11

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…

So what happens when one day, on the way to school, a temporal accident sends your daughter and several other kids to the far future, to a time when people primarly interact with computers using voice input?

The command line kids will adapt more easily than the GUI kids. The GUI kids will probably end up as tavern wenches in the Orion sector, or working in the beryllium mines.

Don't let your daughter end up in the beryllium mines. Teach her the command line.

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

#52

Post by gavinlynch »

lightcatcher wrote: post #44
joesb wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> -file permissions, users, and processes on Linux. Available from most GUI file browser. > -environmental variables Available on GUI. > -package management Synaptic, or some package management GUI. > -what a daemon is There's GUI for Service management. > -possibly how to use a "real" editor such as emacs or vim I didn't Emacs and Vim does not have GUI version. > More importantly, this kids will never be afraid on t…

Just because the tools are available through a GUI doesn't mean that the kids will use them the same way. I learned about as much about the above topics in a week of doing server admin stuff as I did in years of running Ubuntu with GNOME. >I didn't (know) Emacs and Vim does not have GUI version. Despite have GUI versions, the likelihood that most kids would use them is roughly 0. If you give kids a GUI, they'll learn…

Are you seriously suggesting that children would use LaTeX over MSO or MSO-like software?

I find this thought process truly baffling.

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

#53

Post by gavinlynch »

tzs wrote: post #51
Tloewald wrote: post #11

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…

So what happens when one day, on the way to school, a temporal accident sends your daughter and several other kids to the far future, to a time when people primarly interact with computers using voice input? The command line kids will adapt more easily than the GUI kids. The GUI kids will probably end up as tavern wenches in the Orion sector, or working in the beryllium mines. Don't let your daughter end up in the be…

1) The command line was built for people typing figures and is not a direct corollary to natural human speech and language patterns.

2) You may input commands via speech, but are you pretending that there will be no GUI's in the future? That's absurd. Of course we'll have HUD a la Glass or other visual interfaces everywhere, as we do now. We're visual beings and always will be.

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

#54

Post by PhasmaFelis »

My big problem with command line (as it is commonly implemented) involves learning curves. If you're using a GUI word processor/text editor and you don't know how to, I dunno, auto-indent, you open the menu bar and browse around until you find something that says "auto-indent". If you're using Vim, you...google for and try to find a result that actually answers your question and isn't a barely-related comment or a comprehensive list with your answer buried somewhere on screen 12.

Essentially, a GUI allows you to explore the options available to you in a fairly consequence-free manner. Most command lines offer no obvious, intuitive way to do that, and actively punish you for experimenting without being sure of your actions.

(Raised on CLI from the age of 7, BTW, and it took me years to accept GUIs. I've come to believe that they both have their place, but a well-designed GUI is clearly superior for casual day-to-day use. CLI is a useful tool, but a specialized one.)

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

#55

Post by Tloewald »

brodney wrote: post #45
Tloewald wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The natural progression using the command line is to figure out how to avoid using the command line. The natural progression of forcing people to use the command line is to turn them off using computers. Now, the author is presumably a tech geek and the kids probably have some genetic predisposition to doing the kinds of things dad does, so I don't care to predict the outcome. Similarly, the dad may be a great and in…

I disagree with you regarding avoiding using the command line. I enjoy working in terminal and to the extent possible do as much as I can in there. I also try to understand what is happening "behind the scenes" when working in a GUI. The way I look at a GUI is that it is built entirely on terminal functions. I see you disagree, but I don't know how a GUI could be created without being built on something at a lower le…

> I don't know how a GUI could be created without being built on something at a lower level

Which simply makes my point that being CLI-centric has limited your imagination. In fact the original Mac had a UI built directly on top of the system libraries. On startup it displayed an icon and played a chime (which was its hardware self-test result). Insofar as there was a "CLI" it ran UNDER the GUI. (There is something lower level going on that the GUI, but it's not a terminal.)

Even on a primitive command line machine, there's stuff going on below the level of the command line. In Linux you're running a shell, which is actually not part of the kernel. The fact that the kernel can spew text onto the screen during startup is merely an artifact of what's easy to do using the computer's BIOS or equivalent thereof.

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

#56

Post by phaemon »

phaemon wrote: post #38
fps wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Just like there's no difference between saying, "Could you pass the butter, please?" and pointing at it and grunting. :-) Using a command line encourages a person to explore what they can tell the computer to do, rather than accept what a GUI allows them to do. It encourages learning that you can put a list of regularly used commands in a "script" and then re-run them. And then exploring what else can be done with a…

Heh, funny downvote: rather than communicate via text it was "click to disagree" :-D

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

#57

Post by Tloewald »

lightcatcher wrote: post #46
Tloewald wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The natural progression using the command line is to figure out how to avoid using the command line. The natural progression of forcing people to use the command line is to turn them off using computers. Now, the author is presumably a tech geek and the kids probably have some genetic predisposition to doing the kinds of things dad does, so I don't care to predict the outcome. Similarly, the dad may be a great and in…

> It's quite possible that knowledge of vim and emacs and package management won't be the world's most valuable skills in ten years. Whaddya think? Replace your hyperbole of "world's most valuable skills" with just "valuable skills", and I think knowing how to use a text editor and a package manager will still be valuable skills in 10 years. The last 20 years of inertia serve as evidence for me. > Only if that's the…

Kowing how to use a text editor !== emacs / vim

Hyperbole aside, I'm happy to remove "most" and let my sarcasm stand.

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