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I think we take for granted a lot of assumed knowledge that the younger generation simply isn't taught or hasn't been required to learn. The other day one of m

I think we take for granted a lot of assumed knowledge that the younger generation simply isn't taught or hasn't been required to learn. The other day one of my coworkers, a senior engineer in his 40's. Sent a simple C++ program he had written to dump some data into a CSV file to another coworker(a new graduate in her early 20's) via email. I was CC'ed. The email body simply said: Usage: convert.exe [infile] [out.csv] She stopped by my desk later in the day I mentioned in passing "How did that program work out for you?" she then complained that she couldn't work out how to supply the program with the arguments - double clicking the file did nothing for her. Turns out she had never used a command line in her life. I was shocked I grew up on the command line it boggles my mind to thing there is an entire generation who has been raised on nothing but a gui. This is quite a smart person with an (non software) engineering degree mind you.

srean 9y ago
That's what you get when you teach programming with an IDE.
flukus 9y ago
In MS land it's very common for developers to be unwilling or unable to use the command line. The two groups where this is most notable are the younger devs and the ones that come to development via the access/vb classic path. To them if something can't be done in visual studio then it can't be done. One of our code tests for hiring is writing a very simple version of grep with only a few flags like case sensitive, recursive and inverted. Of the 10 or so people that kind of completed it, not a single person seemed to understand that multiple flags could be specified (in any format).
Clubber 9y ago
FWIW, he should have written a simple WinForms or WPF app instead. It probably would have taken just as much time as parsing the args[] array with proper input checking. I know command line because that's all there was for a time. Windows command line is pretty horrible compared to *nix.

srean 9y ago

That's what you get when you teach programming with an IDE.

flukus 9y ago

In MS land it's very common for developers to be unwilling or unable to use the command line. The two groups where this is most notable are the younger devs and the ones that come to development via the access/vb classic path. To them if something can't be done in visual studio then it can't be done. One of our code tests for hiring is writing a very simple version of grep with only a few flags like case sensitive, recursive and inverted. Of the 10 or so people that kind of completed it, not a single person seemed to understand that multiple flags could be specified (in any format).

Clubber 9y ago

FWIW, he should have written a simple WinForms or WPF app instead. It probably would have taken just as much time as parsing the args[] array with proper input checking. I know command line because that's all there was for a time. Windows command line is pretty horrible compared to *nix.