Can highly recommend buying from this guy; there was a holdup on my order once so he reached out personally to make sure it was okay and he also gifted me with another set. Worth supporting even if it's just an untouched collectible!
The Unix Pipe Card Game
71–80 of 88 posts
Re: The Unix Pipe Card Game
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
> usually it meant just straight up getting the command wrong 5 times before trying to read the man page, thinking I understood what the man page meant, trying again another 5 times I think that is a developer's superpower. The poncy term for it is grit. I tell others that the secret to leaning computers is frustration and persistence. > and then giving up. Knowing when to stop or change direction is hard. I've defin…
I've been a sysadmin for a quarter century and I've always said my only real superpower is that I read error messages when they appear, something none of my non-admin coworkers can do, for some reason.
A smart, and by no means technically incompetent friend of mine struggled to get a software product to run. He would reinstall it, try different configuration, uninstall plugins, yet every time he tried running it, the program gave the same error message. I asked him to read the error, and it very simply stated that it was failing to create symlinks because the the disk was formatted with ExFAT. Had he just piped this message into ChatGPT, he would have avoided hours of debugging.
Re: The Unix Pipe Card Game
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
> almost all humans use computers but only 0.1% or so can program them. This is nitpicking but I was curious: there are 4.4 million software developers in the US ( https://www.griddynamics.com/blog/number-software-developers... ). The population is 340 million, 0.1% would be 340,000. You’re off by over one order of magnitude.
there are 45 million devs in the world (out of which probably 10 can actually program) and 8.5 billion people we could say 0.5%?
It’s misleading to use the entire world’s population. A very large proportion of that hasn’t ever had the opportunity to learn to write code.
Re: The Unix Pipe Card Game
#74Re: The Unix Pipe Card Game
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
As a young Linux user I always hated the experimentation aspect because usually it meant just straight up getting the command wrong 5 times before trying to read the man page, thinking I understood what the man page meant, trying again another 5 times and then giving up. This idea of experimenting and getting instant feedback is just survivorship bias for a certain type of person, not “the way we ought to teach Unix…
I'd like to add that, while anything will have some learning friction, learning the Unix CLI is rather unnecessarily painful.
I actually feel like the Unix/Gnu CLI is quite nice (yes I'm used to it already). I feel like it provides a lot of consistency through community standardization and standardization through POSIX and libraries. For example it's quite difficult to find a program that breaks the "-o --option" long/short options and if you do the "man command" or "info command" pages will tell you how to use a program. In my experience this is quite different on for example Windows.
Learning it is a step but once you've learned the basics you can read 90% of the commands.
Re: The Unix Pipe Card Game
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
As a young Linux user I always hated the experimentation aspect because usually it meant just straight up getting the command wrong 5 times before trying to read the man page, thinking I understood what the man page meant, trying again another 5 times and then giving up. This idea of experimenting and getting instant feedback is just survivorship bias for a certain type of person, not “the way we ought to teach Unix…
> usually it meant just straight up getting the command wrong 5 times before trying to read the man page, thinking I understood what the man page meant, trying again another 5 times I think that is a developer's superpower. The poncy term for it is grit. I tell others that the secret to leaning computers is frustration and persistence. > and then giving up. Knowing when to stop or change direction is hard. I've defin…
> the secret to leaning computers is frustration and persistence
And if persistence fails, bring out the big gun: belligerence.
Re: The Unix Pipe Card Game
#77These are very very cool! I am sad they're sold out, but thankful they can be printed.
Re: The Unix Pipe Card Game
#78I already foresee the quibbling on the answer to all the print the nth line questions: do empty lines count? In *nix-land they certainly do, in player-land they might, then again they might not.
When little Johnny gives teacher his 2000 line essay consisting of 1998 empty lines flanked by My 2000 line essay and That's all Folks! teacher will give Johnny a 1 or an F (depending on locality, might even be E where silly rabbits banned 'F' scores). But teacher, I played this here game of cards where empty lines did count won't be accepted as valid reasoning.
Re: The Unix Pipe Card Game
#79The instructions are definitely too brief. They should include all man (in troff ;) ).
Re: The Unix Pipe Card Game
#80As a science teacher and former software dev, I find this totally cute, and I understand exactly why the creator chose to make it a physical card game. That said, I do think the translation into a physical card game means that kids aren't getting the experimentation and near-instant feedback that they'd be getting if they were doing this digitally. In order for a kid to "win," they either have to already know, or exp…
As a young Linux user I always hated the experimentation aspect because usually it meant just straight up getting the command wrong 5 times before trying to read the man page, thinking I understood what the man page meant, trying again another 5 times and then giving up. This idea of experimenting and getting instant feedback is just survivorship bias for a certain type of person, not “the way we ought to teach Unix…
Getting a pipeline wrong 5 times is common. The normal process is: write a couple of steps, right output! Add a grep, bad output! Fix it, again, again, right output! Add cut -bM-N, adjust the boundaries a few times. Sort the output. Oops, sort -n