13 ms·

I introduced my 5-year-old and 2-year-old to startx and xmonad (2012)

205 points by 0des 5y ago

MaxLeiter 5y ago
https://web.archive.org/web/20201112003051/https://changelog.complete.org/archives/7562-i-introduced-my-5-year-old-and-2-year-old-to-startx-and-xmonad-theyre-delighted https://web.archive.org/web/20201112003051/https://changelog... as site seems down Also (2012)
- neonate 5y ago
  https://archive.md/CJuac https://archive.md/CJuac
doublepg23 5y ago
I'd agree with the top rated comment in the OG thread that the children are just enjoying spending time with dad. I recall my love of computing was sparked by my father, but it was mostly self-study. As echoed here love of any subject seems to require the child to gravitate to it personally. Though the children should be what, 15-16 and 12-13 by now, it would be interesting to hear their perspective.
jcims 5y ago
Anyone in here have kids that have zero interest in computers? My kids had no interest and as I get ready to start my second round of hanging out with little ones as my kids have kids, I wonder if I just need to do things differently.
- michaelmrose 5y ago
  I think people's tastes and interests just run a lot of different ways. Computers in the late 80s and 90s were a LOT more boring than today and I personally found them fascinating despite this. If your kids have no interest in computers it doesn't mean you did a bad job it just means that their interests differ from yours.
- luismedel 5y ago
  Most of us, I think. I tried to introduce my daughter to programming two years ago (she was 7) using a very simple language I created specifically for the task (a mix between BASIC and Pascal) with no success. And that's not a bad thing. There's a lot of awesome interests out there for our children outside of computers. Also, I think the main issue today is that "modern times" offers a radical range of enterteinment we didn't have in our times. If I was born today instead of 1980 I think I'd stuck with my early child dream: being a cartoonist.
  - rawoke083600 5y ago
    >offers a radical range of enterteinment we didn't have in our times. I think this is the answer, while I was growing up and learning PASCAL and BASIC (Thank you dad) it was the only way to have access/play with "a computer". Nowadays there are much more shinier and prettier and lets face it more fun computers in our(theirs) immediate environment that does a lot more than "readline a; print a;"
  - fatnoah 5y ago
    My son had zero interest in command lines or programming until he got into Minecraft and Roblox. For the former, best mods are available for Java edition. Through that desire, he at least learned command prompt, basic directory navigation, and java -jar. For the latter, he wants to build a game, so we're learning some LUA together. Going through that process (we're very early in) has been great, since he also has ADHD and doing this work is helping with focus.
- holoduke 5y ago
  Do not worry. The only task you as a parent have is to give your kids room and opportunities to let them find their own desired profession. As a parent you should never say or hope they LL do the same as you.
ddingus 5y ago
I think this is great. My young granddaughter has been working with an Apple //e 8 bit computer. For her, it is about right. Command line, but simpler in her case, running programs... She loves numbers and will use calculators and apps. Reading will take a bit more, but she is getting there. Showing the young people basics like this is high value. They will have context and perspective similar to what we have.
- defaultcompany 5y ago
  I have an old Apple ][ as well and my kids like playing around on it from time to time. The best thing about it is you can’t break it. If something goes wrong they just turn it off and turn it back on. I’m also not worried they are going to delete all my iCloud photos or wipe my work drive or see something inappropriate on the internet.
  - ddingus 5y ago
    Exactly. Same here. I have a CFFA 3000 card in mine, so they have a whole bunch of stuff to run and play with
ashton314 5y ago
This is the way. I've thought long and hard about how to kind of insulate my kids from GUIs as they grow up. I'd love for them to view computers mostly as tools for organizing information and learning. I don't want them to see it as a means for entertainment—that will come for sure, but I'd like to delay that as long as possible. Better to let kids learn to play in the dirt outside than get stuck inside, IMO.
- emodendroket 5y ago
  I feel like this is one of those things where they'll either gravitate towards it or not. Most of my early introductions to computing devices were just playing video games which wasn't exactly educational.
  - verve_rat 5y ago
    I'm sure if we start talking about it, there will be a bunch of people of a certain age that will wax lyrical about putting mouse drivers in the high memory area, testing changes to autoexec.bat to see what works, using EMM386, and a bunch of other stuff I have forgotten. Just getting to the stage of playing games used to be a lot more educational than it is now, and I think there is something to that. If I had kids I would definitely try to recreate that experience for them somehow.
    - emodendroket 5y ago
      I didn't have to do any of that, I put the cartridge in the slot or clicked the icon on the desktop. Or I did but it came later when I was already really into games and wanted to putz with emulators or whatever.
      - eurasiantiger 5y ago
        Figuring out to how to load mouse, sound card and CD-ROM drivers while still having at least 605kB free base memory for launching SimCity was definitely a generational experience.
ggm 5y ago
The inventors of the mouse, and Seymour Papert (logo, turtle) would applaud. As a child, I used a light pen on a very early PDP machine, in the 60s and it was interesting how intuitive "point and click" can be (it had a cathode display, and a strobe line, and you could select points with a light sensitive pen, and the click was just mapped to some serial I/O. The pen read the x/y strobe timer, and knew where you were on the screen by when the light hit and its exterior knowledge of the screen refresh)
na85 5y ago
My 4 year old inherited my old Thinkpad X220 and uses it to play a game where she opens up emacs and types interesting patterns.
dang 5y ago
Discussed at the time: I introduced my 5yo and 2yo to startx and xmonad. They’re delighted. - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4141993 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4141993 - June 2012 (193 comments)
ogma 5y ago
I remember when I was young how cool I thought it was to enter a small number of DOS terminal commands in order to run certain games. My dad wrote the commands down for each game (e.g. Wings of Glory) on note cards and I had no trouble doing it myself after that, like these kids.
YeBanKo 5y ago
A bit of a digression, but when is it appropriate to introduce kids to a computer at all. Isn't 2 years old too young? There are ways to entertain creativity and abstract thinking at that age that involve more physical activity. It does seem like they will spend the rest of the time attached to monitors regardless of what profession they choose. I always wanted to delay that as much as possible. Although, I am an avid terminal user and former emacs fanboy, I don't understand the appeal of a command line in this case. It seems, that it is rather a shortcoming of UI that you have to switch to cli to achieve a maximum productivity in development work. There is Logo, there is Scratch, there are some other nice apps for iPads + guided access to teach kids about underlying of computing. CLI seems like a very opinionated way of doing things, rather than exposing underlying structure.
- zarzavat 5y ago
  I don't think there's a bad time to introduce kids to a computer, that seems harmless. What is bad is when the computer/tablet/phone becomes a pacifier that parents park their kids in front of. Better to give them actual toys that they will grow out of, rather than a screen that they won't.
  - elliotec 5y ago
    > Better to give them actual toys that they will grow out of, rather than a screen that they won't. I know this is true, but why is it true? We have a 4 month old, she gets very nearly zero screen time, but on the rare occasion I have her on my lap for a few minutes during a meeting, playing a game, or video chatting with overseas family/friends, she is enamored and, yes, pacified. What precisely is the harm in that vs "a toy they will grow out of?" I will also add I had what I have long considered it a privilege that I had been introduced to computers at a very young age, as well as the internet (for better or (probably mostly?) worse).
    - fukpaywalls2 5y ago
      i made the mistake of giving my son a laptop at an early age so he could play some puzzle games while I work on my own laptop. Later on, his mother as part of pta of a private school handed out iphones as prizes to his class. Now, we seldom have any conversations as he his immersed in his own world.
blntechie 5y ago
Well, I don’t know. I don’t want to pass on my preferences and likings to my kids. I’d like them to figure out things from a clean slate without my opinionated views on top of it, good or bad. On the other hand, children have to learn things from somewhere or someone. If not me, maybe someone else e.g. a teacher at school. They probably won’t learn things unless we expose several different things to them. So it’s a conflict between the desire of having the kid learn things which I believe are good or give them the space and time to figure things out and arrive on a conclusion on their own. Maybe CLI, GUI with mouse or touch screens are all not the ideal interfaces at all, maybe the kid will imagine something else altogether, who knows. Why limit their perspective into a box?
- 10000truths 5y ago
  > Maybe CLI, GUI with mouse or touch screens are all not the ideal interfaces at all, maybe the kid will imagine something else altogether, who knows. Why limit their perspective into a box? Being exposed to old/existing ideas doesn’t stop people from coming up with new or improved ideas - quite the contrary, it serves as a potential inspiration upon which one can create a better product. That’s not putting perspectives in a box, that’s just how innovation works - you build off of and improve other people’s work in an incremental fashion.
  - noisy_boy 5y ago
    I think contrary to what some people think, limited tools spark creativity to extract the maximum out of them. I remember when I learned DOS in a computer class, I absolutely loved creating simple scripts to do some task. Then they introduced us to Windows and basically the entire class groaned and moaned - some people actually complained to the teacher that using the mouse was "cumbersome" :)
    - foxfluff 5y ago
      And on the other hand, limited tools spark the creativity to create something better. I've been learning kicad recently and it is damn hard to resist the urge to start a project to make a better tool..
Indy9000 5y ago
Let the kids have their childhood. Monads can wait.
- UweSchmidt 5y ago
  Good one! I was also curious if he taught his kids Haskell but it turns out they just played with Linux.
md8z 5y ago
I'm going to get flak for this but I'll say it anyway: tiling window managers are awful and broken, everybody who uses them on Linux knows it and either doesn't want to admit it or knows it and doesn't care. I get why they are appealing to programmers, it's alluring to think that you can use a desktop without ever taking your hands off the keyboard, and it's fun to write little scripts to control things. But honestly, everything that can be done with a tiling window manager can be done better with other tools. Yes, they are that broken. They get used because they're a fun little tool for programmers to play with and break and waste time, and not because they have any practical purpose. There are plenty of better computing skills to teach children than this. And before someone accuses me of being a KDE fanboy or GNOME fanboy or something, I used tiling window managers for many years. I've spent countless hours playing around with them and hacking on them. It was a frustrating experience the whole way through and when I look back at the whole thing there was really nothing positive about it. I'm completely serious here, I don't think I would have made this comment back when the article was written but that's all I can say after 9 years of messing around with it. I suppose they are great if you want to introduce your child early on to the classic experience of Linux where everything is controlled entirely through arcane and badly document config files and keyboard shortcuts, and lots of things just randomly don't work. If you are a person who works on these things or wants to teach them to children, in my opinion your time would be better spent elsewhere.
- aneutron 5y ago
  I don't understand how you can objectively qualify a tiling manager as "broken". 1st of all, tiling managers are a matter of personal preference, no wether it's "broken". 2nd of all, I've used i3 plenty, and the amount of power it gives me when I'm working is immense. I no longer need to alt+tab 7 times to get to the terminal for the monitoring servers, I always know they're on screen 4. I need my web browser ? I know it's in screen 2. Heck, I can pin apps, and even screens to specific monitors. When I'm working on an incident, my throughput is basically multiplied by 3 as a result of how streamlined my work environment is. That is simply not possible with other environment where the mouse is the main device. Yes you have virtual desktops, but try having 15 open terminals without having them pinned in some form. Just a simple swipe to the corner and your GPU will heat-up from the 3D acceleration required to show all the windows :D All-in-all, I genuinely believe that tiling wms are an amazing godsend, but for my use case. And I cannot emphasize this enough. It's a personal preference. Yes it's a bit of a pain to set up (although I literally used a two-part youtube video to set up i3, and never touched it again, not even need the Arch wiki), but if you don't have to tinker in your configuration are you really running linux :D
throwaway47292 5y ago
I really like the command line approach to 'start a program' and 'tell the computer what to do' and sometimes i teach my daughter to 'pipe' one program's output into another's input She knows a bit of python (here is the log https://github.com/jackdoe/programming-for-kids https://github.com/jackdoe/programming-for-kids) and wants to talk about programming for her school report and I thought it will be great to print some small programs (is_prime or something similar) to give to the kids to type on their own, but it is practially impossible to give code to another person so they can type it, unless I make a webpage where they have to do it. Just imagine how much is needed to setup python3 on mac or windows, go to security settings to run unsigned programs, deal with paths, or install brew or whatever, there is no chance anyone can do that unsupervised. We are now working on making commodore like experience computer for her with pizero2 and good mechanical keyboard and 7" display, with mini linux that just inits into an editor. F2 saves the code, F3 loads from the file, F5 runs the code, it has direct access to /dev/fb0 and it just draws on the screen on top of the editor. She enjoyed making the 6x3 font, pixel by pixel so much.. https://github.com/jackdoe/programming-for-kids/blob/master/projects/tty/main.py#L10 https://github.com/jackdoe/programming-for-kids/blob/master/... I think modern platforms take, or are on the way to take, absolutely all agency from the user. From phones to game consoles to macbooks to cars, everything is just "get this approved app from the cloud" which gets disabled if you do something wrong or you dont want to update.
guest345678_10 5y ago
You can teach kids at any age almost anything and they do not bother if it is kind of interesting, but from what I have noted something that kids 2-5 year need half a day to learn, kids at 8-11 years need only 5 minutes or so. And they forget it if left at that, at the same pace. The key point is to choose the right moment when kids have interest and can learn it relatively fast, and make sure to repeat it somehow in non-boring ways. And all that I get usually wrong.
shapefrog 5y ago
I for one would welcome an update - how is the experiment with the now 14-year old and 11 year old progressing?
sersi 5y ago
This is rather apropos for me as I'm wondering how to introduce my son to computers once he turns 3. I do think that older computers had an advantage in that they forced a certain level of comprehension. I also do not want to get my son used to phones or tablets because I feel that they tend to be more consumption devices than promoting creation. And I also feel that it's good to have a clear separation between computer time and non-computer time. I often see people using a tablet or phone as digital pacifier and it doesn't seem like a good long term parenting technique to me. So I'm hesitating between giving him something running linux like the author or setting up a mister with Atari ST and just having him use it as if it were an old computer. Linux is more modern and more complex whereas Atari ST has a rich software library, the interface and system that is relatively easy to understand.
- camhenlin 5y ago
  This is actually not a bad idea. I started my son (now 4) last year on a Macintosh Plus playing around mostly in kidpix and MacWrite. Now he asks if he can “work” on the old computer in my office while I work.
- tweetle_beetle 5y ago
  I'm really confused by these comments about pre-school aged children and I would suggest that the author if the article is in the extreme minority if he is able to spend any time at all at a command prompt with a two year old. I'll assume good faith and an extremely unusually gifted child, but if you've spent time with two year olds the anecdote stretches credibility. Don't get me wrong, I remember the magic feeling of cd and ls ing around a drive to find and run programs on DOS after being taught by my dad, but I certainly wasn't 3 and there was a tangible benefit - I was becoming self-sufficient. (Even then, the closest it offered to entertainment was a selection of carefully curated educational "games".) Putting snobbery about modern technology like touchscreens to one side - what's the point of a text based interface if you can't even read comfortably? I suspect that the HN demographic will tend towards children with higher educational achievement than average, but this is where most kids are: > From ages 3-4, most preschoolers become able to: > > - Understand that print carries a message > - Make attempts to read and write > - Identify some letters and make some letter-sound matches > - Use known letters (or their best attempt to write the letters) to represent written language especially for meaningful words like their names or phrases such as "I love you" Helping Your Child Become A Reader. U.S. Department of Education (2000)
mgdv 5y ago
I think their environment has a part to play in it My 6 year old had been using scratch at school but seeing me using Arch and programming in Java made him want to use the terminal and write words to code. He said that scratch was a "toy" and he wanted to do "real" computer work So he knows a few Linux commands now
zwaps 5y ago
I will have to deal with this question soon. I am, at this point, really unsure about how to handle it. I do not want to artificially limit my kid to technologies that are no longer really relevant, but I do agree that safeguarding attention is THE skill of the next century, simply because it will be scarce. Like many here, my thinking is mainly driven by my own experiences: I started quite early and even though it's not my field of study, I now have this innate "talent" to code and figure out technical problems. I struggle much less to learn tech things. I think it's like starting to play Piano early. I want my kid to learn this and have the confidence in their technical ability as I do. I always felt this gave me a leg up, although it may of course be illusory. In any case, it came through coding early. However, even back then, I wanted to use the computer for fun. I didn't "try" to be productive. There was no internet, I had barely any books and only a lot of dev software, and no games. So I had to learn to make games myself. And lacking any tutorials or information, I needed to trial and error everything. Would I have done the same today? Or would I have just consumed if Steam or GOG is freely available. Or, even when coding, stackexchange is just a click away. Would I be similarly positive about early computing if I had those things? Who knows? Obviously, hacking into a bare shell or IDE without any outside info is not how people use computers nowadays. Furthermore, the above reads like a parent trying to recreate his own life in the life of a child. The world is different, surely. Gah, I don't know. I suppose the consume vs. create dichtonomy mentioned elsewhere in this thread might be a useful rule.
- throwaway47292 5y ago
  > Obviously, hacking into a bare shell or IDE without any outside info is not how people use computers nowadays. Furthermore, the above reads like a parent trying to recreate his own life in the life of a child. The world is different, surely. different for sure, most people use computers as spectators, computers happen to them; of course they can enjoy it, just as you can enjoy music without making music. But sometimes I feel musicians appreciate music in a different way, same as woodworkers appreciate a nice table in a different way. Reminds me of 'What I can not create, I do not understand' (Feynman's last board), but not entirely in the way he meant it.
- jvvw 5y ago
  Mine are 8 and 10 and it's hard. They are playing a lot of Minecraft at the moment, and I feel that has really got them into the time of mindset that you describe as a child, making things incredible things out of redstone, more than the programming I have done with them. They do watch lots of videos about minecraft but it is those video that have inspired them to build things and try them. In terms of programming, Scratch is the de facto way of introducing programming these days. It has its pros and cons, but has a lot going for it. Microbits are fun too. Times are different though, and it is hard often to separate time spent creating vs time spent consuming.
thesquib 5y ago
I had access to computers when I was young, but mostly sans gaming. In fact, once I wiped a work computer of my dad's somehow. Eventually I got SimCity 2000 on our old Mac and that was incredible. These old computers were tools to experiment and have fun with, rather than the entertainment devices we have today.
Phenix88be 5y ago
I m calling this fake... Think about it: a 5 year old? Who could write anything at that age? You can't even hold a pencil properly at 5 year old, so using a keyboard and bash? Please... I dare you to put a 5 year old in front of a CLI only computer and have them not ignoring it because it does nothing.
- eurasiantiger 5y ago
  I was personally writing simple BASIC code by the age of five, it doesn’t take much to flip a switch and type in a few characters to start the editor. Don’t underestimate the learning capability of a child.
- GOATS- 5y ago
  I was burning CDs on my parents' Windows XP computer when I was 5, so I'm sure this is real.
- parksy 5y ago
  I was doing BASIC on an Amstrad CPC at 5. Sure it was just simple GOTO 10 stuff (print hello, border 10, print alex, border 5, goto 10 etc...), but I also knew how to run games (how else would I play harrier attack?). My mum in particular was very attentive to teaching me reading and writing and I did cursive from a young age, I got in trouble at age 7 because I wasn't doing the curriculum-endorsed print in class (the teacher picked me up by the hair and shook me), but yeah I was definitely doing basic computer stuff by 5 and definitely knew how to pick up a pencil. I always say I started programming at 10 because it sounds more believable and that's when I was making simple text adventure games but yeah. Welcome to the mid 80s where having a CLI was the only way to compute at home, where parenting was a great deal more laissez flair but also more punitive (the whole debate about "smacking" was still in the future then).
- ebruchez 5y ago
  Kids have varying abilities and are receptive to different things at different ages depending on personality / ability. Mozart was playing piano concerts at 5 but the vast majority of kids wouldn't be able to do that no matter the environment. Some kids are calm and open to teaching and coaching very early and some are not. People who have experienced precocious abilities for themselves or their own children often assume that this is universal (or just a matter of great parenting) but I don't think it is.
pantulis 5y ago
"Jacob informed me that he wanted his computer to look “just like yours." This is it. What the kid wants is to mimic what he sees his parent is doing, and I believe the parent is projecting his own desires and inclinations onto the little one. I do not think there is anything specifically wrong with this though, because that's what learning is about (too screen time as a kid could be an issue regarding myopia and so on, though). But stating that at 3 years the "kid wants" something as specific as running a Linux destop by himself is wrong.
- throwaway889900 5y ago
  Could probably get the same response by running hollywood [1] on a spare monitor. [1] https://github.com/dustinkirkland/hollywood https://github.com/dustinkirkland/hollywood
oftenwrong 5y ago
I was having some trouble loading this. Here is an internet archive snapshot, in case it becomes unavailable: https://web.archive.org/web/20211104073437/https://changelog.complete.org/archives/7562-i-introduced-my-5-year-old-and-2-year-old-to-startx-and-xmonad-theyre-delighted https://web.archive.org/web/20211104073437/https://changelog... This is interesting to me because it explores the true intuitiveness of UI paradigms. What is intuitive to someone who is already familiar with common computer UIs is not necessarily intuitive to children, or to people who have never used a computer system. A keypad with single-purpose keys is very intuitive, IMO. Something like this: https://i.redd.it/6tmhfx75a8c01.jpg https://i.redd.it/6tmhfx75a8c01.jpg One button for each application. One button for each operation. I have this crazy idea to obtain a large custom array of keys, and to map as many things as possible to single-key-presses. As an aside, this is the kind of headline I'd expect to see on a HN-themed version of The Onion.
mobilemidget 5y ago
I'm about to do this for my three year old, old laptop BSD or linux on it, and I thought about not putting a desktop on it at first. What kind of command line/console applications would people here recommend for a child? (native dutch/russian)
Fire-Dragon-DoL 5y ago
I'm still curious, was the 3 years old able to read or typing from memory?
upbeatlinux 5y ago
Introducing kids to multiple x's? Good on you! Be careful your gnu doesn't write an x-pose on it.
bastardoperator 5y ago
This reminds me of my boy. He had a linux box and used it for minecraft at an early age. He memorized java -jar pretty quickly. Eight years later at 14 he's deep into retro gaming and emulators and to be honest half the stuff he's looking at looks way out of my league. Most of his free time is spent compiling and fixing old games, mostly for himself. I was blown away when he showed me his own doom levels/game. He's on GitHub and has already contributed to several projects.
phonebucket 5y ago
These sound like pretty talented kids. I imagine that most three year olds are still struggling with the alphabet!
corpdronejuly 5y ago
I teach intro to CS for a homeschool co-op and love seeing this kind of story! Children can absolutely learn a lot more than we think they can, provided we take their capabilities seriously and give the appropriate scaffolding.
jrochkind1 5y ago
Darnit, I was hoping for a 5-year-old explaining what monads are to me.

205 points by 0des 5y ago

https://web.archive.org/web/20201112003051/https://changelog.complete.org/archives/7562-i-introduced-my-5-year-old-and-2-year-old-to-startx-and-xmonad-theyre-delighted https://web.archive.org/web/20201112003051/https://changelog... as site seems down Also (2012)

neonate 5y ago
https://archive.md/CJuac https://archive.md/CJuac

doublepg23 5y ago

I'd agree with the top rated comment in the OG thread that the children are just enjoying spending time with dad. I recall my love of computing was sparked by my father, but it was mostly self-study. As echoed here love of any subject seems to require the child to gravitate to it personally. Though the children should be what, 15-16 and 12-13 by now, it would be interesting to hear their perspective.

jcims 5y ago

Anyone in here have kids that have zero interest in computers? My kids had no interest and as I get ready to start my second round of hanging out with little ones as my kids have kids, I wonder if I just need to do things differently.

michaelmrose 5y ago
I think people's tastes and interests just run a lot of different ways. Computers in the late 80s and 90s were a LOT more boring than today and I personally found them fascinating despite this. If your kids have no interest in computers it doesn't mean you did a bad job it just means that their interests differ from yours.
luismedel 5y ago
Most of us, I think. I tried to introduce my daughter to programming two years ago (she was 7) using a very simple language I created specifically for the task (a mix between BASIC and Pascal) with no success. And that's not a bad thing. There's a lot of awesome interests out there for our children outside of computers. Also, I think the main issue today is that "modern times" offers a radical range of enterteinment we didn't have in our times. If I was born today instead of 1980 I think I'd stuck with my early child dream: being a cartoonist.
- rawoke083600 5y ago
  >offers a radical range of enterteinment we didn't have in our times. I think this is the answer, while I was growing up and learning PASCAL and BASIC (Thank you dad) it was the only way to have access/play with "a computer". Nowadays there are much more shinier and prettier and lets face it more fun computers in our(theirs) immediate environment that does a lot more than "readline a; print a;"
- fatnoah 5y ago
  My son had zero interest in command lines or programming until he got into Minecraft and Roblox. For the former, best mods are available for Java edition. Through that desire, he at least learned command prompt, basic directory navigation, and java -jar. For the latter, he wants to build a game, so we're learning some LUA together. Going through that process (we're very early in) has been great, since he also has ADHD and doing this work is helping with focus.
holoduke 5y ago
Do not worry. The only task you as a parent have is to give your kids room and opportunities to let them find their own desired profession. As a parent you should never say or hope they LL do the same as you.

ddingus 5y ago

I think this is great. My young granddaughter has been working with an Apple //e 8 bit computer. For her, it is about right. Command line, but simpler in her case, running programs... She loves numbers and will use calculators and apps. Reading will take a bit more, but she is getting there. Showing the young people basics like this is high value. They will have context and perspective similar to what we have.

defaultcompany 5y ago
I have an old Apple ][ as well and my kids like playing around on it from time to time. The best thing about it is you can’t break it. If something goes wrong they just turn it off and turn it back on. I’m also not worried they are going to delete all my iCloud photos or wipe my work drive or see something inappropriate on the internet.
- ddingus 5y ago
  Exactly. Same here. I have a CFFA 3000 card in mine, so they have a whole bunch of stuff to run and play with

ashton314 5y ago

This is the way. I've thought long and hard about how to kind of insulate my kids from GUIs as they grow up. I'd love for them to view computers mostly as tools for organizing information and learning. I don't want them to see it as a means for entertainment—that will come for sure, but I'd like to delay that as long as possible. Better to let kids learn to play in the dirt outside than get stuck inside, IMO.

emodendroket 5y ago
I feel like this is one of those things where they'll either gravitate towards it or not. Most of my early introductions to computing devices were just playing video games which wasn't exactly educational.
- verve_rat 5y ago
  I'm sure if we start talking about it, there will be a bunch of people of a certain age that will wax lyrical about putting mouse drivers in the high memory area, testing changes to autoexec.bat to see what works, using EMM386, and a bunch of other stuff I have forgotten. Just getting to the stage of playing games used to be a lot more educational than it is now, and I think there is something to that. If I had kids I would definitely try to recreate that experience for them somehow.
  - emodendroket 5y ago
    I didn't have to do any of that, I put the cartridge in the slot or clicked the icon on the desktop. Or I did but it came later when I was already really into games and wanted to putz with emulators or whatever.
    - eurasiantiger 5y ago
      Figuring out to how to load mouse, sound card and CD-ROM drivers while still having at least 605kB free base memory for launching SimCity was definitely a generational experience.

ggm 5y ago

The inventors of the mouse, and Seymour Papert (logo, turtle) would applaud. As a child, I used a light pen on a very early PDP machine, in the 60s and it was interesting how intuitive "point and click" can be (it had a cathode display, and a strobe line, and you could select points with a light sensitive pen, and the click was just mapped to some serial I/O. The pen read the x/y strobe timer, and knew where you were on the screen by when the light hit and its exterior knowledge of the screen refresh)

na85 5y ago

My 4 year old inherited my old Thinkpad X220 and uses it to play a game where she opens up emacs and types interesting patterns.

dang 5y ago

Discussed at the time: I introduced my 5yo and 2yo to startx and xmonad. They’re delighted. - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4141993 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4141993 - June 2012 (193 comments)

ogma 5y ago

I remember when I was young how cool I thought it was to enter a small number of DOS terminal commands in order to run certain games. My dad wrote the commands down for each game (e.g. Wings of Glory) on note cards and I had no trouble doing it myself after that, like these kids.

YeBanKo 5y ago

A bit of a digression, but when is it appropriate to introduce kids to a computer at all. Isn't 2 years old too young? There are ways to entertain creativity and abstract thinking at that age that involve more physical activity. It does seem like they will spend the rest of the time attached to monitors regardless of what profession they choose. I always wanted to delay that as much as possible. Although, I am an avid terminal user and former emacs fanboy, I don't understand the appeal of a command line in this case. It seems, that it is rather a shortcoming of UI that you have to switch to cli to achieve a maximum productivity in development work. There is Logo, there is Scratch, there are some other nice apps for iPads + guided access to teach kids about underlying of computing. CLI seems like a very opinionated way of doing things, rather than exposing underlying structure.

zarzavat 5y ago
I don't think there's a bad time to introduce kids to a computer, that seems harmless. What is bad is when the computer/tablet/phone becomes a pacifier that parents park their kids in front of. Better to give them actual toys that they will grow out of, rather than a screen that they won't.
- elliotec 5y ago
  > Better to give them actual toys that they will grow out of, rather than a screen that they won't. I know this is true, but why is it true? We have a 4 month old, she gets very nearly zero screen time, but on the rare occasion I have her on my lap for a few minutes during a meeting, playing a game, or video chatting with overseas family/friends, she is enamored and, yes, pacified. What precisely is the harm in that vs "a toy they will grow out of?" I will also add I had what I have long considered it a privilege that I had been introduced to computers at a very young age, as well as the internet (for better or (probably mostly?) worse).
  - fukpaywalls2 5y ago
    i made the mistake of giving my son a laptop at an early age so he could play some puzzle games while I work on my own laptop. Later on, his mother as part of pta of a private school handed out iphones as prizes to his class. Now, we seldom have any conversations as he his immersed in his own world.

blntechie 5y ago

Well, I don’t know. I don’t want to pass on my preferences and likings to my kids. I’d like them to figure out things from a clean slate without my opinionated views on top of it, good or bad. On the other hand, children have to learn things from somewhere or someone. If not me, maybe someone else e.g. a teacher at school. They probably won’t learn things unless we expose several different things to them. So it’s a conflict between the desire of having the kid learn things which I believe are good or give them the space and time to figure things out and arrive on a conclusion on their own. Maybe CLI, GUI with mouse or touch screens are all not the ideal interfaces at all, maybe the kid will imagine something else altogether, who knows. Why limit their perspective into a box?

10000truths 5y ago
> Maybe CLI, GUI with mouse or touch screens are all not the ideal interfaces at all, maybe the kid will imagine something else altogether, who knows. Why limit their perspective into a box? Being exposed to old/existing ideas doesn’t stop people from coming up with new or improved ideas - quite the contrary, it serves as a potential inspiration upon which one can create a better product. That’s not putting perspectives in a box, that’s just how innovation works - you build off of and improve other people’s work in an incremental fashion.
- noisy_boy 5y ago
  I think contrary to what some people think, limited tools spark creativity to extract the maximum out of them. I remember when I learned DOS in a computer class, I absolutely loved creating simple scripts to do some task. Then they introduced us to Windows and basically the entire class groaned and moaned - some people actually complained to the teacher that using the mouse was "cumbersome" :)
  - foxfluff 5y ago
    And on the other hand, limited tools spark the creativity to create something better. I've been learning kicad recently and it is damn hard to resist the urge to start a project to make a better tool..

Indy9000 5y ago

Let the kids have their childhood. Monads can wait.

UweSchmidt 5y ago
Good one! I was also curious if he taught his kids Haskell but it turns out they just played with Linux.

md8z 5y ago

I'm going to get flak for this but I'll say it anyway: tiling window managers are awful and broken, everybody who uses them on Linux knows it and either doesn't want to admit it or knows it and doesn't care. I get why they are appealing to programmers, it's alluring to think that you can use a desktop without ever taking your hands off the keyboard, and it's fun to write little scripts to control things. But honestly, everything that can be done with a tiling window manager can be done better with other tools. Yes, they are that broken. They get used because they're a fun little tool for programmers to play with and break and waste time, and not because they have any practical purpose. There are plenty of better computing skills to teach children than this. And before someone accuses me of being a KDE fanboy or GNOME fanboy or something, I used tiling window managers for many years. I've spent countless hours playing around with them and hacking on them. It was a frustrating experience the whole way through and when I look back at the whole thing there was really nothing positive about it. I'm completely serious here, I don't think I would have made this comment back when the article was written but that's all I can say after 9 years of messing around with it. I suppose they are great if you want to introduce your child early on to the classic experience of Linux where everything is controlled entirely through arcane and badly document config files and keyboard shortcuts, and lots of things just randomly don't work. If you are a person who works on these things or wants to teach them to children, in my opinion your time would be better spent elsewhere.

aneutron 5y ago
I don't understand how you can objectively qualify a tiling manager as "broken". 1st of all, tiling managers are a matter of personal preference, no wether it's "broken". 2nd of all, I've used i3 plenty, and the amount of power it gives me when I'm working is immense. I no longer need to alt+tab 7 times to get to the terminal for the monitoring servers, I always know they're on screen 4. I need my web browser ? I know it's in screen 2. Heck, I can pin apps, and even screens to specific monitors. When I'm working on an incident, my throughput is basically multiplied by 3 as a result of how streamlined my work environment is. That is simply not possible with other environment where the mouse is the main device. Yes you have virtual desktops, but try having 15 open terminals without having them pinned in some form. Just a simple swipe to the corner and your GPU will heat-up from the 3D acceleration required to show all the windows :D All-in-all, I genuinely believe that tiling wms are an amazing godsend, but for my use case. And I cannot emphasize this enough. It's a personal preference. Yes it's a bit of a pain to set up (although I literally used a two-part youtube video to set up i3, and never touched it again, not even need the Arch wiki), but if you don't have to tinker in your configuration are you really running linux :D

throwaway47292 5y ago

I really like the command line approach to 'start a program' and 'tell the computer what to do' and sometimes i teach my daughter to 'pipe' one program's output into another's input She knows a bit of python (here is the log https://github.com/jackdoe/programming-for-kids https://github.com/jackdoe/programming-for-kids) and wants to talk about programming for her school report and I thought it will be great to print some small programs (is_prime or something similar) to give to the kids to type on their own, but it is practially impossible to give code to another person so they can type it, unless I make a webpage where they have to do it. Just imagine how much is needed to setup python3 on mac or windows, go to security settings to run unsigned programs, deal with paths, or install brew or whatever, there is no chance anyone can do that unsupervised. We are now working on making commodore like experience computer for her with pizero2 and good mechanical keyboard and 7" display, with mini linux that just inits into an editor. F2 saves the code, F3 loads from the file, F5 runs the code, it has direct access to /dev/fb0 and it just draws on the screen on top of the editor. She enjoyed making the 6x3 font, pixel by pixel so much.. https://github.com/jackdoe/programming-for-kids/blob/master/projects/tty/main.py#L10 https://github.com/jackdoe/programming-for-kids/blob/master/... I think modern platforms take, or are on the way to take, absolutely all agency from the user. From phones to game consoles to macbooks to cars, everything is just "get this approved app from the cloud" which gets disabled if you do something wrong or you dont want to update.

guest345678_10 5y ago

You can teach kids at any age almost anything and they do not bother if it is kind of interesting, but from what I have noted something that kids 2-5 year need half a day to learn, kids at 8-11 years need only 5 minutes or so. And they forget it if left at that, at the same pace. The key point is to choose the right moment when kids have interest and can learn it relatively fast, and make sure to repeat it somehow in non-boring ways. And all that I get usually wrong.

shapefrog 5y ago

I for one would welcome an update - how is the experiment with the now 14-year old and 11 year old progressing?

sersi 5y ago

This is rather apropos for me as I'm wondering how to introduce my son to computers once he turns 3. I do think that older computers had an advantage in that they forced a certain level of comprehension. I also do not want to get my son used to phones or tablets because I feel that they tend to be more consumption devices than promoting creation. And I also feel that it's good to have a clear separation between computer time and non-computer time. I often see people using a tablet or phone as digital pacifier and it doesn't seem like a good long term parenting technique to me. So I'm hesitating between giving him something running linux like the author or setting up a mister with Atari ST and just having him use it as if it were an old computer. Linux is more modern and more complex whereas Atari ST has a rich software library, the interface and system that is relatively easy to understand.

camhenlin 5y ago
This is actually not a bad idea. I started my son (now 4) last year on a Macintosh Plus playing around mostly in kidpix and MacWrite. Now he asks if he can “work” on the old computer in my office while I work.
tweetle_beetle 5y ago
I'm really confused by these comments about pre-school aged children and I would suggest that the author if the article is in the extreme minority if he is able to spend any time at all at a command prompt with a two year old. I'll assume good faith and an extremely unusually gifted child, but if you've spent time with two year olds the anecdote stretches credibility. Don't get me wrong, I remember the magic feeling of cd and ls ing around a drive to find and run programs on DOS after being taught by my dad, but I certainly wasn't 3 and there was a tangible benefit - I was becoming self-sufficient. (Even then, the closest it offered to entertainment was a selection of carefully curated educational "games".) Putting snobbery about modern technology like touchscreens to one side - what's the point of a text based interface if you can't even read comfortably? I suspect that the HN demographic will tend towards children with higher educational achievement than average, but this is where most kids are: > From ages 3-4, most preschoolers become able to: > > - Understand that print carries a message > - Make attempts to read and write > - Identify some letters and make some letter-sound matches > - Use known letters (or their best attempt to write the letters) to represent written language especially for meaningful words like their names or phrases such as "I love you" Helping Your Child Become A Reader. U.S. Department of Education (2000)

mgdv 5y ago

I think their environment has a part to play in it My 6 year old had been using scratch at school but seeing me using Arch and programming in Java made him want to use the terminal and write words to code. He said that scratch was a "toy" and he wanted to do "real" computer work So he knows a few Linux commands now

zwaps 5y ago

I will have to deal with this question soon. I am, at this point, really unsure about how to handle it. I do not want to artificially limit my kid to technologies that are no longer really relevant, but I do agree that safeguarding attention is THE skill of the next century, simply because it will be scarce. Like many here, my thinking is mainly driven by my own experiences: I started quite early and even though it's not my field of study, I now have this innate "talent" to code and figure out technical problems. I struggle much less to learn tech things. I think it's like starting to play Piano early. I want my kid to learn this and have the confidence in their technical ability as I do. I always felt this gave me a leg up, although it may of course be illusory. In any case, it came through coding early. However, even back then, I wanted to use the computer for fun. I didn't "try" to be productive. There was no internet, I had barely any books and only a lot of dev software, and no games. So I had to learn to make games myself. And lacking any tutorials or information, I needed to trial and error everything. Would I have done the same today? Or would I have just consumed if Steam or GOG is freely available. Or, even when coding, stackexchange is just a click away. Would I be similarly positive about early computing if I had those things? Who knows? Obviously, hacking into a bare shell or IDE without any outside info is not how people use computers nowadays. Furthermore, the above reads like a parent trying to recreate his own life in the life of a child. The world is different, surely. Gah, I don't know. I suppose the consume vs. create dichtonomy mentioned elsewhere in this thread might be a useful rule.

throwaway47292 5y ago
> Obviously, hacking into a bare shell or IDE without any outside info is not how people use computers nowadays. Furthermore, the above reads like a parent trying to recreate his own life in the life of a child. The world is different, surely. different for sure, most people use computers as spectators, computers happen to them; of course they can enjoy it, just as you can enjoy music without making music. But sometimes I feel musicians appreciate music in a different way, same as woodworkers appreciate a nice table in a different way. Reminds me of 'What I can not create, I do not understand' (Feynman's last board), but not entirely in the way he meant it.
jvvw 5y ago
Mine are 8 and 10 and it's hard. They are playing a lot of Minecraft at the moment, and I feel that has really got them into the time of mindset that you describe as a child, making things incredible things out of redstone, more than the programming I have done with them. They do watch lots of videos about minecraft but it is those video that have inspired them to build things and try them. In terms of programming, Scratch is the de facto way of introducing programming these days. It has its pros and cons, but has a lot going for it. Microbits are fun too. Times are different though, and it is hard often to separate time spent creating vs time spent consuming.

thesquib 5y ago

I had access to computers when I was young, but mostly sans gaming. In fact, once I wiped a work computer of my dad's somehow. Eventually I got SimCity 2000 on our old Mac and that was incredible. These old computers were tools to experiment and have fun with, rather than the entertainment devices we have today.

Phenix88be 5y ago

I m calling this fake... Think about it: a 5 year old? Who could write anything at that age? You can't even hold a pencil properly at 5 year old, so using a keyboard and bash? Please... I dare you to put a 5 year old in front of a CLI only computer and have them not ignoring it because it does nothing.

eurasiantiger 5y ago
I was personally writing simple BASIC code by the age of five, it doesn’t take much to flip a switch and type in a few characters to start the editor. Don’t underestimate the learning capability of a child.
GOATS- 5y ago
I was burning CDs on my parents' Windows XP computer when I was 5, so I'm sure this is real.
parksy 5y ago
I was doing BASIC on an Amstrad CPC at 5. Sure it was just simple GOTO 10 stuff (print hello, border 10, print alex, border 5, goto 10 etc...), but I also knew how to run games (how else would I play harrier attack?). My mum in particular was very attentive to teaching me reading and writing and I did cursive from a young age, I got in trouble at age 7 because I wasn't doing the curriculum-endorsed print in class (the teacher picked me up by the hair and shook me), but yeah I was definitely doing basic computer stuff by 5 and definitely knew how to pick up a pencil. I always say I started programming at 10 because it sounds more believable and that's when I was making simple text adventure games but yeah. Welcome to the mid 80s where having a CLI was the only way to compute at home, where parenting was a great deal more laissez flair but also more punitive (the whole debate about "smacking" was still in the future then).
ebruchez 5y ago
Kids have varying abilities and are receptive to different things at different ages depending on personality / ability. Mozart was playing piano concerts at 5 but the vast majority of kids wouldn't be able to do that no matter the environment. Some kids are calm and open to teaching and coaching very early and some are not. People who have experienced precocious abilities for themselves or their own children often assume that this is universal (or just a matter of great parenting) but I don't think it is.

pantulis 5y ago

"Jacob informed me that he wanted his computer to look “just like yours." This is it. What the kid wants is to mimic what he sees his parent is doing, and I believe the parent is projecting his own desires and inclinations onto the little one. I do not think there is anything specifically wrong with this though, because that's what learning is about (too screen time as a kid could be an issue regarding myopia and so on, though). But stating that at 3 years the "kid wants" something as specific as running a Linux destop by himself is wrong.

throwaway889900 5y ago
Could probably get the same response by running hollywood [1] on a spare monitor. [1] https://github.com/dustinkirkland/hollywood https://github.com/dustinkirkland/hollywood

oftenwrong 5y ago

I was having some trouble loading this. Here is an internet archive snapshot, in case it becomes unavailable: https://web.archive.org/web/20211104073437/https://changelog.complete.org/archives/7562-i-introduced-my-5-year-old-and-2-year-old-to-startx-and-xmonad-theyre-delighted https://web.archive.org/web/20211104073437/https://changelog... This is interesting to me because it explores the true intuitiveness of UI paradigms. What is intuitive to someone who is already familiar with common computer UIs is not necessarily intuitive to children, or to people who have never used a computer system. A keypad with single-purpose keys is very intuitive, IMO. Something like this: https://i.redd.it/6tmhfx75a8c01.jpg https://i.redd.it/6tmhfx75a8c01.jpg One button for each application. One button for each operation. I have this crazy idea to obtain a large custom array of keys, and to map as many things as possible to single-key-presses. As an aside, this is the kind of headline I'd expect to see on a HN-themed version of The Onion.

mobilemidget 5y ago

I'm about to do this for my three year old, old laptop BSD or linux on it, and I thought about not putting a desktop on it at first. What kind of command line/console applications would people here recommend for a child? (native dutch/russian)

Fire-Dragon-DoL 5y ago

I'm still curious, was the 3 years old able to read or typing from memory?

upbeatlinux 5y ago

Introducing kids to multiple x's? Good on you! Be careful your gnu doesn't write an x-pose on it.

bastardoperator 5y ago

This reminds me of my boy. He had a linux box and used it for minecraft at an early age. He memorized java -jar pretty quickly. Eight years later at 14 he's deep into retro gaming and emulators and to be honest half the stuff he's looking at looks way out of my league. Most of his free time is spent compiling and fixing old games, mostly for himself. I was blown away when he showed me his own doom levels/game. He's on GitHub and has already contributed to several projects.

phonebucket 5y ago

These sound like pretty talented kids. I imagine that most three year olds are still struggling with the alphabet!

corpdronejuly 5y ago

I teach intro to CS for a homeschool co-op and love seeing this kind of story! Children can absolutely learn a lot more than we think they can, provided we take their capabilities seriously and give the appropriate scaffolding.

jrochkind1 5y ago

Darnit, I was hoping for a 5-year-old explaining what monads are to me.