16 ms·

How many Linux commands can a 7 year old learn?

176 points by ivanche 4y ago

smoldesu 4y ago
I presume we're using a very liberal definition of the word "learn" here; I couldn't even memorize these commands when I was 10, I reckon if you quizzed them again in a week they'd have forgotten all about it.
- boomboomsubban 4y ago
  I still have my times tables memorized decades later. Frequent use is the key, if the parent regularly engages with their child in this way I expect they'd remember them for years.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- eimrine 4y ago
  just let your toddler to save some porn in that dirs and you'll see if he needs your help in the next time.
- chrismatheson 4y ago
  Please locate the git commit that fails this test without googling.
  - sodality2 4y ago
    git bisect start [last working commit] [earliest broken commit] git bisect good/bad E: I mixed the commits up. The irony
    - Gigachad 4y ago
      Knowing the exact syntax of git bisect isn't that useful when you use it quite rarely. Knowing that git bisect exists and that it does what you need is the real knowledge.
- colechristensen 4y ago
  Learning isn’t really about memorization
- kanzenryu2 4y ago
  I got a laugh from this about tar https://xkcd.com/1168/ https://xkcd.com/1168/
- shakna 4y ago
  My six year old can quote parts of her books she's read exactly once, six to twelve months ago. She's not special in that regard. You'd be surprised at just how much information a kid can memorize - it's the on-demand recall that tends to be more hit and miss, and I'd suggest that's more to do with the sheer amount of new stuff they have on hand all the time. Hard to query the index as it's being rebuilt. But give the kid the right context cues, and they can take off running. My daughter knows Bash. She always stares blankly at the first minute, but with someone able to get her started, she'll be back to writing her CYOA game in about five minutes.
- tritip 4y ago
  The term "muscle memory" is apt. I've been typing shell commands for 40+ years now. VIM commands for the last 30. They are as natural as brushing one's teeth. I learned them when young and never forgot.
thorin 4y ago
At 6/7 I was typing in BASIC programs for my VIC-20 out of the book which isn't much different to working with a command line. I don't think I was exceptional, there just wasn't much else to do in the 80s.
- racl101 4y ago
  That's pretty much it. So many kids learned to type some commands on a Commodore 64. There wasn't an iPhone to steal their attention.
- dvh 4y ago
  At 7 I was typing programs from the book of around 100 basic examples on Atari 800xl and making derivatives. It would help if someone told me back than what a subroutine is.
- ale42 4y ago
  Around 8 I was copying the example programs from the GW-BASIC manual (especially the ones that involved graphics) on an MS-DOS 3.1 computer, then I was randomly modifying them to see what would happen... not exactly sure how I ended up learning how to program, but at 10 I was able to do simple programs in BASIC. I think that learning in an environment without a GUI was in the end very helpful. Of course in the beginning it was quite difficult, but very gratifying when I got something right.
doubled112 4y ago
My parents had never owned a computer before. My first PC came with an empty HDD, and somebody gave me a DOS boot disk. It was weeks before we tracked somebody down to install a copy of Windows on it. I'll never be sure how many trials and errors I had before I could do something, but eventually I figured some things out. Definitely would have been faster with somebody showing me. I probably would have been about 6 or 7. Watching my 7 year old fumbling around with Scratch makes me think it's not as rare or amazing as it seems. He gets better all the time.
- deltaonefour 4y ago
  You're a rare parent who doesn't think their first kid is some kind of future genius.
- chrismatheson 4y ago
  You’re a rare parent who will let their kid struggle a bit because that’s how they learn
  - Gigachad 4y ago
    Some middle ground between just blindly following instructions and just getting stuck without making any progress before giving up would be ideal. Spending some time critically thinking and trying a few options but then getting guidance when all the obvious options have been explored.
- dgfitz 4y ago
  My 2 year old can grab our iPad, ask us to unlock it, and proceed to open Netflix or Disney plus (depending on his mood) and pick what show he was looking to watch. We taught him basic signs before he could speak (milkies, more, all done) He’s not a savant by any stretch of the imagination. Kids are quite capable at very young ages. Parents are usually the ones holding kids back. I make my 8-year old struggle and work when she asks for help. She gets mad, but I can see her actually learning how to learn. She also is not a savant, just a normal 8-year old.
bitwize 4y ago
Depends on the 7 year old. I was 7 when I saw a Unix system for the first time, a Tandy Model 16 running Xenix. I used the 'learn' command to learn how to operate the shell and its commands. The way 'learn' works is, it presents a lesson, and then has you apply that lesson in a fake shell environment. When you achieve the goals it sets forth, it deems you ready to move on to the next lesson. I got around at a basic level with that knowledge, learning how to copy, rename, delete files, etc. and create new ones with 'ed' or 'vi'. Just enough to be dangerous, as they say. It wasn't until a few years later that I understood pipes, filters, redirection,and how to write my own commands in shell or C.
euph0ria 4y ago
Next post by author will be how one should wait before teaching the rm command to kids, and to always have a backup of all valuable files.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- mekster 4y ago
  Are people still using raw "rm" and not aliasing to "trash-put"? People should start making their shells act like in the 2000's and not 1990. I only use raw "rm" when I need to delete a large folder that should not go in the trash bin. In fact distros should start caring for user friendliness and even ask to do that on installation. A system with no trash bin is what, before Windows 95?
  - serf 4y ago
    > Are people still using raw "rm" and not aliasing to "trash-put"? as a regular user of rm for decades without any issue whatsoever this reads like parody. I understand it probably isn't, and I understand the logic behind the design choices that are prevalent in a modern OS.. but some of us just want the machine to do what it's told the first time, and we're competent and confident enough with our holstered foot-guns that we're not a major threat to any system that is being administrated properly. >In fact distros should start caring for user friendliness and even ask to do that on installation. I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of scripts suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced. I fear something terrible has happened.
    - 0des 4y ago
      > this reads like parody people try to coin terms and initiate trends all the time. it's no 'thats so fetch' but its not that bad. I'd never use it personally and have never heard of this type of lunacy but to each their own.
    - mekster 4y ago
      > as a regular user of rm for decades without any issue whatsoever this reads like parody. Sure, for someone riding a horse for decades, a bicycle may look like a parody but people should look for more convenient methods. > we're competent and confident enough with our holstered foot-guns that we're not a major threat to any system that is being administrated properly. This is more like a parody that you should realize how many people are losing data over simple wrong "rm" everyday as apparently average people aren't as competent as you're with decades of experience. Desktop Linux also has a trash bin like anyone would expect. Not sure why this is not the case on the command line. Yes, aliasing rm to trash-put may screw bunch of scripts but that doesn't mean people should find out about trash-cli after they've lost data. Smart scripts should not rely on aliases but use a clean environment or specify a full path to a command as well. It could act as trash-put when used interactively or how come rm itself can't evolve over POSIX when rm is one of the easiest way to screw yourself with no confirmation by default.
bradleybuda 4y ago
If you want to teach a kid the command line, I highly recommend ‘sl’ as a first command - my two-year-old had never forgotten it: https://github.com/mtoyoda/sl https://github.com/mtoyoda/sl
- amcpu 4y ago
  I honestly cannot remember ever typing sl instead of ls. Funny little “utility” in place there. It doesn’t appear to be part of a minimal Ubuntu installation, have you found it install “out of the box” with any Linux distros?
  - 0des 4y ago
    recent distros or of all time?
    - amcpu 4y ago
      Any, I was just curious. :)
  - eternityforest 4y ago
    I basically never make any letter swap typos at all. I guess it's more common with faster typists that are using more fingers at once, and going fast enough that they aren't thinking one individual letters?
    - Handytinge 4y ago
      Anecdotally I'm 130wpm+ and I make that typo a few times a week.
    - jakear 4y ago
      Slow typist here, I make letter swap typos all the time. Cmd+T is my best friend. Curious if other aphantastics are similarly slow/error prone? I cannot visualize a keyboard, and while I can usually type without looking, my form is poor and I do steal occasional glances.
aj7 4y ago
I’m 71 and can’t learn any. Typing cryptic commands? I could learn but would forget by the next day. Had the first 128k Mac. Why backslide?
- 0des 4y ago
  "can't"
- asdff 4y ago
  you can usually type "man command" or command --help and bring up a guide. you can also write up a cheat sheet in your bashrc or somewhere else convenient for whatever you are documenting. its like any other piece of info, either rehearse it until its baked in or write it down somewhere you can reference it again.
  - aj7 4y ago
    Thanks.
- schwartzworld 4y ago
  I have the exact opposite problem. Once I spend an hour figuring out a work flow, I can throw it in a shell script or alias it. How do I replicate that preservation of effort in a gui?
Jorengarenar 4y ago
Great, then logically the next step obviously is learning Vim
- ozfive 4y ago
  You mean emacs :)
  - mikewarot 4y ago
    You mean nano ;)
    - phist_mcgee 4y ago
      It's ed or it's nothing
      - ivanche 4y ago
        I'm sorry guys, it will be vim :)
        etu 4y ago
        You mean emacs with evil-mode, right?
      - benibela 4y ago
        Or dd Put each byte where it belongs
        mikewarot 4y ago
        This is the best answer... as toggle switches as input truly sucks!
carapace 4y ago
Kids are mostly being "dumbed" in school not educated. E.g.: "Squeak Etoys, Children & Learning", Alan Kay > The projects developed in Squeak use a different and simpler kind of incremental mathematics that allows very young children to understand some of the key ideas in calculus. We have found that more than 90% of 5th graders not only understand “Galilean gravity” but are able to derive the mathematical “formulas” (actually 2nd order differential equations) using this alternative mathematics, and author a simulation that matches up very well with the experimental data. http://www.vpri.org/pdf/rn2005001_learning.pdf http://www.vpri.org/pdf/rn2005001_learning.pdf (Also, something about infants and sign language... And László Polgár and his three daughters, whom he raised to be chess prodigies...) We are barely scratching the surface of human potential...
sumthinprofound 4y ago
At 7 I was banging on an electric typewriter and red LED calculator. My mother could explain how pressing a typewriter key triggered a typebar and left an impression with ribbon. Fascinating. She couldn't explain how the calculator worked, but she let me punch the numbers in when she was balancing the checkbook and how it all added up. Magical. A few years later and I was typing in c64 basic programs from the back of magazines. Then it was I showing my father how to schedule and print little league baseball games, and my mother how to track her bowling tournament results. Thanks for sharing your story. It is amazing what kids can do with just a bit of a nudge.
- noisy_boy 4y ago
  I just want to convey my appreciation of how you gave back to your parents, with dividend, the knowledge built upon the foundation they laid for you.
  - jiggawatts 4y ago
    At 10 or 11 years old, I made my Mom a random number generator for picking Lotto numbers. I knew it wouldn't make a difference to the odds, but it made her happy...
  - sumthinprofound 4y ago
    As I was reading OP's story I flashbacked to my first introduction to technology at that age. I'm most grateful for them raising me intellectually curious, reading to me at a young age, and to never say no when I asked them to buy me a book. My father (84 now) is up to date with technology, he gets the mechanics and can perform his tasks (windows, android, roku) but I don't think he has a conceptual model of how any of this works. It was fascinating to me growing up, if you gave him a budget for buying a computer he could spec out the best "bang for your buck" knowing 8GB RAM > 4GB RAM and a 1Gig HD is > 500 MB HD without actually understanding what the components were. He was never interested in that level of detail, just show him how to click and do it.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
mistrial9 4y ago
this seems to me like a male equivalent of "8 year old girls in beauty pagents", honestly... At that tender cognitive age, the terminal is not the reality..
- mlyle 4y ago
  First-- hyperbole. Spending an hour with your dad tinkering with a terminal prompt is hardly the same as preparing for and entering a beauty pageant. My 8 year old doesn't sit at the terminal, but he sure likes going to Scratch and editing the computer games there... sometimes writing his own, but usually just finding amusing ways to cheat or make existing games do weird things. I wish it was a little easier to get into the "under the hood" stuff for kids. A whole lot of kids can do it and would enjoy it, but there's too many things with shallower learning curves in computers competing for attention. As far as "tender cognitive age"--- not everyone picks up the mental models and procedural thinking needed to be a decent programmer. A little bit of early exposure probably makes this more likely. Of course, too much of anything is bad.
  - mistrial9 4y ago
    > My 8 year old doesn't sit at the terminal the title of this article, that I commented on, is literally "How many Linux commands can a 7 year old learn?"
    - mlyle 4y ago
      > the title of this article, that I commented on, is literally "How many Linux commands can a 7 year old learn?" Did you just willfully skip everything I said to focus on this? The article is about a kid who spent an hour, once, with his dad experimenting with a terminal. He's interested and curious and probably wants to do it again. I told you that my 8 year old doesn't sit at a terminal, but has spent a fair bit more than an hour doing a somewhat similar computing task. He's also hyper-social and well adapted dealing with other living beings.
- ivanche 4y ago
  I certainly didn't intend to sound that way! When my son asked me about the terminal, I didn't have an idea whether 2 minutes later he'll say "Dad this is boring" or I would have to pull him into bed an hour later because next day was a school day. It just turned out to be the second one and I felt the story was interesting enough to share it.
nont 4y ago
Don't teach him 'sudo' just yet :D sudo papa buy me a lego set
- ivanche 4y ago
  Lolz, he knows how to get that without sudo already :)
snvzz 4y ago
A lot of them, probably. That's about the age where I learned programming (with AmigaBASIC). At that point, I did already know a bunch of CLI commands, too. Kids can very easily get immersed into something. They also have a lot of free time.
napmo 4y ago
But why? There are more important things out there to teach to a 7 year old kid. Later, the kid can learn much faster, more important commands than simple 'ls' stuff. Life skills, math, sports and stuff like that are much more important and fun, compared to these simple commands.
- klodolph 4y ago
  If you always prioritize learning the "important" stuff, it's gonna suck the joy out of your life and your kid's life. Kids learn by imitating. If they see you learning the terminal, they ask you how to use it. The right thing to do is to show them.
  - IE6 4y ago
    This basically explains how I began. My parents had DOS and Windows 3.11 machines and I wanted to get at the games. Eventually the games became boring and I explored the OS and other programs. This eventually turned into an IT career (after a decade or so of additional unimportant stuff).
- fragmede 4y ago
  I know! I'm so glad I didn't learn anything unimportant as a kid. My brain would have become all full up and it'd be too full to learn the important things later on.
- asdff 4y ago
  Because being able to use a computer to general purpose compute is helpful all over life. It's not a separate skill, its a tool. If you like math and sports you can use code to quickly run analytics on arbitrary data. Maybe you win the march madness bracket among your friends this year as a result or you start tracking interesting info on your personal skills. Maybe you can use some custom software to help you speed through a homework assignment in school, or you can opt to make some software and sell it on the side instead of flipping burgers for part time work while in school. Maybe you like cooking, now with programming you can write a scraper to collect recipes from these js heavy websites and store them into a local database not prone to bit rot. All people should be budgeting, and knowing how to code means you can easily roll your own budgeting software without having to deal with fees or the lack of features tailored to your own purposes from big commercial software. If you decide to run a small business, now you can handle your own web development, you can rope in services to run a storefront or track business analytics. maybe you are into gardening, now you can program a raspberry pi to water your plants for you whenever the soil starts to dry out or the weather calls for a lack of rain or some hot weather in the future. programming is a tool that you can apply to just about every facet of life and output any number of posibilities. Not having learned it earlier is my biggest regret. imo knowing how to program and really understand how a computer works should be seen as the reading and writing of our modern age. computer literacy is low in this world and that's dangerous, but i think the reason for this is people just don't often get exposed to programming unless they want to seek it out themselves. it's rare to have parents who know how to code or even schools that offer classes in coding, much less require it like english.
asdff 4y ago
Honestly the command line seems less conceptually challenging than having to learn a gui and all its abstractions first. Think of copying and pasting a file in mac os and explaining it to someone for the first time: "ok, now open finder. its in the dock. you have to move the mouse to the bottom of the screen. its the man with the face. ok now we need to get to the file. ok where did you put it? ok lets click to it. is that it? ok right click. lets find copy. great where is it going, click back, its the button up there, click back again, click it one more time, lets go forward again, ok in that folder, click on the name, no thats a triple click click somewhere else and lets try again, ok double click, ok now we are in, ok right click, paste." versus "type cp filefromyada toyada and press enter" A lot of people are so used to the GUI that they get scared of having to learn to walk again practically and diving into the cli. But if you never learned all the hoops and crap we have to deal with finagling stuff around a modern gui, I think you'd be able to do a lot more powerful things a lot faster starting with the cli from the beginning. I really wish I grew up learning the cli vs the gui, personally. guis also frequently change whereas the cli feels like its etched in stone (or you can use a container with whatever version of the stone you like)
- lupire 4y ago
  You skipped the part about learning what a directly path is, and how to find the names of all the subdirs in the paths.
  - asdff 4y ago
    You could explain the file system hierarchy and how to built a path string with a sheet of paper and a pen and a minute or two. That part isn't the hard part of the cli IMO. When you want to find the names of the subdirs, then you introduce ls. Now you know two powerful command line tools, cp and ls, in a few minutes of explanation.
- thereisnospork 4y ago
  >"type cp filefromyada toyada and press enter" so hit the 't' key, followed by the 'y' key ,,, followed by the enter key to copy this file. While this is a trite example, how many linux how-do-I-do-this's get resolved with copy this command with half a dozen flags[0] into your terminal? The underlying problem with CLI is they lack information about the underlying structural logic and discoverability about the interaction. This makes it hard to impossible to extend 'copy this file' to 'open this file', or 'make this file read only'. In a (decent) GUI once 'left-click select' 'double-click open' and 'right-click options' is understood the rest is spelled out. Unlike with a CLI, where one needs to remember 'ls'[1] there are only two buttons on a mouse. I absolutely agree GUI changes - especially paradigm changes - are a plague though. [0]Which invariably seem to have a different obtuse formatting from the last command I had to copy. [1]Which stands for what anyway?
barefeg 4y ago
Very wholesome post! My three year old likes to play “work” (simulating what I do while working). He asks me to give instructions like click this menu then click this button then type this letter then that… look that says your name!
davewasthere 4y ago
I think it's pretty cool Vasa was up after 10pm learning cool stuff with his dad. Recently got my daughter into doing web application testing. She found four bugs in an hour. Trying stuff that I never thought of. I've created a monster. (She's getting paid, don't worry)
jojo14 4y ago
This is not quite surprising as I experienced a few times that kids understand pretty well a CLI rather than a GUI. As soon as they can read the concept of a REPL is rather straightforward for many so called computer "illiterates". Say something to the computer through writing it on the keyboard then wait for the processing of it and finally see the result displayed on the screen. Plus the history of commands is also very intuitive. Is it because it's all based on natural language faculties that we all possess as soon as we are born?
DavidSJ 4y ago
My son can’t touch type yet He might not be able to touch type, but now he can type touch.
ahthat 4y ago
Hilarious!!!
notorandit 4y ago
Linux commands? Bash/tcsh/zsh commands! There is no such a thing as "Linux command"!
- jtvjan 4y ago
  Aside from echo, the commands taught weren't builtins. If you want to be nitpicky, you could call them ‘coreutils commands’.
physicsguy 4y ago
I'm actually not surprised at all by this, because I was born in the early 90s. We got a Windows 98 computer when I was about 5, and I used to play DOS games on it all the time which had to be booted up by rebooting into DOS mode.
sylware 4y ago
I was exposed to such thing. The daughter of one of my exes, 13, was thrown at a face by a "teacher", raw IPv4 configuration with NAT *bsd/linux commands (no IP, no networking lectures, nothing), and the follow-up test asked her to do exactly that from a completely deconfigured network interface (if I recall properly). If among the parents' children there is someone competent, this teacher is going to get in trouble: because she was hopeless (stress, etc) and I would not expect otherwise. "Kobayashi Maru" of teaching?
- pxeger1 4y ago
  I don't understand what you mean by "was thrown at a face"
celdon25 4y ago
I knew a handful of DOS commands at the age of 3 (late 1980s). My father was smart enough not to include “del” among those.
oneeyedpigeon 4y ago
That's amazing progress for one hour — congratulations! > He goes on another spree of rm <something> I cant be the only one who was waiting for him to try `rm -rf /`, can I? ;) Seriously, though, give him his own account asap!
- ivanche 4y ago
  Thank you sir! Somehow I didn't think it was time for his own account, but hey, why not, I will give him a proper sandbox. I won't add him to sudoers file though :)
flerchin 4y ago
Hi Vasa, Hope you are having a great Tuesday and hope all is well! My name is flerchin, I am a technical recruiter for Amazon Web Services (AWS) and am hiring for Software Engineers looking for 100% fully remote roles. I’m reaching out because your experience and development background intrigued me and are in line with what we are looking for to help continue to build AWS. Especially your recent work would complement the AWS teams here and I know they would be interested in speaking to you.
- andrew_ 4y ago
  I can't tell if this is satire.
  - nothrowaways 4y ago
    Vasa is the 7 year old's name :)
    - Handytinge 4y ago
      I know that, and I still can't tell.
- ivanche 4y ago
  Every LinkedIn recruiter, ever :)
andrew_ 4y ago
Kids are absolute sponges. I've got my three year old using a dozen or so different tools based on need (different screw drivers, wrenches aka spanners, and sockets). Actual tools that adults use, not the playset plastic variety. It's wild.
- alt227 4y ago
  Just an interested question. What need does a 3 year old have for adult tools?
  - andrew_ 4y ago
    I have her out there changing my oil every 7k miles. She's small. Can shimmy under there without using jacks. It's aces. In all seriousness - use of physical tools teaches a myriad of skills. Just a few; hand-eye coordination, problem solving, visual spacial recognition. Children's toy brands like Melissa & Doug sell a wide variety of sets for development of these and other skills. Her using my tools is additional parental involvement and interaction, bonding time. Nothing but positives.
EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 4y ago
Thats about as many as I learned in my 60+ years. I received lifetime immunity against CLI during my time with VAX VMS and its storage room of reference foliants.
nickd2001 4y ago
One command appreciated by 7-yr olds is : touch poo

176 points by ivanche 4y ago

I presume we're using a very liberal definition of the word "learn" here; I couldn't even memorize these commands when I was 10, I reckon if you quizzed them again in a week they'd have forgotten all about it.

boomboomsubban 4y ago
I still have my times tables memorized decades later. Frequent use is the key, if the parent regularly engages with their child in this way I expect they'd remember them for years.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
eimrine 4y ago
just let your toddler to save some porn in that dirs and you'll see if he needs your help in the next time.
chrismatheson 4y ago
Please locate the git commit that fails this test without googling.
- sodality2 4y ago
  git bisect start [last working commit] [earliest broken commit] git bisect good/bad E: I mixed the commits up. The irony
  - Gigachad 4y ago
    Knowing the exact syntax of git bisect isn't that useful when you use it quite rarely. Knowing that git bisect exists and that it does what you need is the real knowledge.
colechristensen 4y ago
Learning isn’t really about memorization
kanzenryu2 4y ago
I got a laugh from this about tar https://xkcd.com/1168/ https://xkcd.com/1168/
shakna 4y ago
My six year old can quote parts of her books she's read exactly once, six to twelve months ago. She's not special in that regard. You'd be surprised at just how much information a kid can memorize - it's the on-demand recall that tends to be more hit and miss, and I'd suggest that's more to do with the sheer amount of new stuff they have on hand all the time. Hard to query the index as it's being rebuilt. But give the kid the right context cues, and they can take off running. My daughter knows Bash. She always stares blankly at the first minute, but with someone able to get her started, she'll be back to writing her CYOA game in about five minutes.
tritip 4y ago
The term "muscle memory" is apt. I've been typing shell commands for 40+ years now. VIM commands for the last 30. They are as natural as brushing one's teeth. I learned them when young and never forgot.

thorin 4y ago

At 6/7 I was typing in BASIC programs for my VIC-20 out of the book which isn't much different to working with a command line. I don't think I was exceptional, there just wasn't much else to do in the 80s.

racl101 4y ago
That's pretty much it. So many kids learned to type some commands on a Commodore 64. There wasn't an iPhone to steal their attention.
dvh 4y ago
At 7 I was typing programs from the book of around 100 basic examples on Atari 800xl and making derivatives. It would help if someone told me back than what a subroutine is.
ale42 4y ago
Around 8 I was copying the example programs from the GW-BASIC manual (especially the ones that involved graphics) on an MS-DOS 3.1 computer, then I was randomly modifying them to see what would happen... not exactly sure how I ended up learning how to program, but at 10 I was able to do simple programs in BASIC. I think that learning in an environment without a GUI was in the end very helpful. Of course in the beginning it was quite difficult, but very gratifying when I got something right.

doubled112 4y ago

My parents had never owned a computer before. My first PC came with an empty HDD, and somebody gave me a DOS boot disk. It was weeks before we tracked somebody down to install a copy of Windows on it. I'll never be sure how many trials and errors I had before I could do something, but eventually I figured some things out. Definitely would have been faster with somebody showing me. I probably would have been about 6 or 7. Watching my 7 year old fumbling around with Scratch makes me think it's not as rare or amazing as it seems. He gets better all the time.

deltaonefour 4y ago
You're a rare parent who doesn't think their first kid is some kind of future genius.
chrismatheson 4y ago
You’re a rare parent who will let their kid struggle a bit because that’s how they learn
- Gigachad 4y ago
  Some middle ground between just blindly following instructions and just getting stuck without making any progress before giving up would be ideal. Spending some time critically thinking and trying a few options but then getting guidance when all the obvious options have been explored.
dgfitz 4y ago
My 2 year old can grab our iPad, ask us to unlock it, and proceed to open Netflix or Disney plus (depending on his mood) and pick what show he was looking to watch. We taught him basic signs before he could speak (milkies, more, all done) He’s not a savant by any stretch of the imagination. Kids are quite capable at very young ages. Parents are usually the ones holding kids back. I make my 8-year old struggle and work when she asks for help. She gets mad, but I can see her actually learning how to learn. She also is not a savant, just a normal 8-year old.

bitwize 4y ago

Depends on the 7 year old. I was 7 when I saw a Unix system for the first time, a Tandy Model 16 running Xenix. I used the 'learn' command to learn how to operate the shell and its commands. The way 'learn' works is, it presents a lesson, and then has you apply that lesson in a fake shell environment. When you achieve the goals it sets forth, it deems you ready to move on to the next lesson. I got around at a basic level with that knowledge, learning how to copy, rename, delete files, etc. and create new ones with 'ed' or 'vi'. Just enough to be dangerous, as they say. It wasn't until a few years later that I understood pipes, filters, redirection,and how to write my own commands in shell or C.

euph0ria 4y ago

Next post by author will be how one should wait before teaching the rm command to kids, and to always have a backup of all valuable files.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
mekster 4y ago
Are people still using raw "rm" and not aliasing to "trash-put"? People should start making their shells act like in the 2000's and not 1990. I only use raw "rm" when I need to delete a large folder that should not go in the trash bin. In fact distros should start caring for user friendliness and even ask to do that on installation. A system with no trash bin is what, before Windows 95?
- serf 4y ago
  > Are people still using raw "rm" and not aliasing to "trash-put"? as a regular user of rm for decades without any issue whatsoever this reads like parody. I understand it probably isn't, and I understand the logic behind the design choices that are prevalent in a modern OS.. but some of us just want the machine to do what it's told the first time, and we're competent and confident enough with our holstered foot-guns that we're not a major threat to any system that is being administrated properly. >In fact distros should start caring for user friendliness and even ask to do that on installation. I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of scripts suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced. I fear something terrible has happened.
  - 0des 4y ago
    > this reads like parody people try to coin terms and initiate trends all the time. it's no 'thats so fetch' but its not that bad. I'd never use it personally and have never heard of this type of lunacy but to each their own.
  - mekster 4y ago
    > as a regular user of rm for decades without any issue whatsoever this reads like parody. Sure, for someone riding a horse for decades, a bicycle may look like a parody but people should look for more convenient methods. > we're competent and confident enough with our holstered foot-guns that we're not a major threat to any system that is being administrated properly. This is more like a parody that you should realize how many people are losing data over simple wrong "rm" everyday as apparently average people aren't as competent as you're with decades of experience. Desktop Linux also has a trash bin like anyone would expect. Not sure why this is not the case on the command line. Yes, aliasing rm to trash-put may screw bunch of scripts but that doesn't mean people should find out about trash-cli after they've lost data. Smart scripts should not rely on aliases but use a clean environment or specify a full path to a command as well. It could act as trash-put when used interactively or how come rm itself can't evolve over POSIX when rm is one of the easiest way to screw yourself with no confirmation by default.

bradleybuda 4y ago

If you want to teach a kid the command line, I highly recommend ‘sl’ as a first command - my two-year-old had never forgotten it: https://github.com/mtoyoda/sl https://github.com/mtoyoda/sl

amcpu 4y ago
I honestly cannot remember ever typing sl instead of ls. Funny little “utility” in place there. It doesn’t appear to be part of a minimal Ubuntu installation, have you found it install “out of the box” with any Linux distros?
- 0des 4y ago
  recent distros or of all time?
  - amcpu 4y ago
    Any, I was just curious. :)
- eternityforest 4y ago
  I basically never make any letter swap typos at all. I guess it's more common with faster typists that are using more fingers at once, and going fast enough that they aren't thinking one individual letters?
  - Handytinge 4y ago
    Anecdotally I'm 130wpm+ and I make that typo a few times a week.
  - jakear 4y ago
    Slow typist here, I make letter swap typos all the time. Cmd+T is my best friend. Curious if other aphantastics are similarly slow/error prone? I cannot visualize a keyboard, and while I can usually type without looking, my form is poor and I do steal occasional glances.

aj7 4y ago

I’m 71 and can’t learn any. Typing cryptic commands? I could learn but would forget by the next day. Had the first 128k Mac. Why backslide?

0des 4y ago
"can't"
asdff 4y ago
you can usually type "man command" or command --help and bring up a guide. you can also write up a cheat sheet in your bashrc or somewhere else convenient for whatever you are documenting. its like any other piece of info, either rehearse it until its baked in or write it down somewhere you can reference it again.
- aj7 4y ago
  Thanks.
schwartzworld 4y ago
I have the exact opposite problem. Once I spend an hour figuring out a work flow, I can throw it in a shell script or alias it. How do I replicate that preservation of effort in a gui?

Jorengarenar 4y ago

Great, then logically the next step obviously is learning Vim

ozfive 4y ago
You mean emacs :)
- mikewarot 4y ago
  You mean nano ;)
  - phist_mcgee 4y ago
    It's ed or it's nothing
    - ivanche 4y ago
      I'm sorry guys, it will be vim :)
      - etu 4y ago
        You mean emacs with evil-mode, right?
    - benibela 4y ago
      Or dd Put each byte where it belongs
      - mikewarot 4y ago
        This is the best answer... as toggle switches as input truly sucks!

carapace 4y ago

Kids are mostly being "dumbed" in school not educated. E.g.: "Squeak Etoys, Children & Learning", Alan Kay > The projects developed in Squeak use a different and simpler kind of incremental mathematics that allows very young children to understand some of the key ideas in calculus. We have found that more than 90% of 5th graders not only understand “Galilean gravity” but are able to derive the mathematical “formulas” (actually 2nd order differential equations) using this alternative mathematics, and author a simulation that matches up very well with the experimental data. http://www.vpri.org/pdf/rn2005001_learning.pdf http://www.vpri.org/pdf/rn2005001_learning.pdf (Also, something about infants and sign language... And László Polgár and his three daughters, whom he raised to be chess prodigies...) We are barely scratching the surface of human potential...

sumthinprofound 4y ago

At 7 I was banging on an electric typewriter and red LED calculator. My mother could explain how pressing a typewriter key triggered a typebar and left an impression with ribbon. Fascinating. She couldn't explain how the calculator worked, but she let me punch the numbers in when she was balancing the checkbook and how it all added up. Magical. A few years later and I was typing in c64 basic programs from the back of magazines. Then it was I showing my father how to schedule and print little league baseball games, and my mother how to track her bowling tournament results. Thanks for sharing your story. It is amazing what kids can do with just a bit of a nudge.

noisy_boy 4y ago
I just want to convey my appreciation of how you gave back to your parents, with dividend, the knowledge built upon the foundation they laid for you.
- jiggawatts 4y ago
  At 10 or 11 years old, I made my Mom a random number generator for picking Lotto numbers. I knew it wouldn't make a difference to the odds, but it made her happy...
- sumthinprofound 4y ago
  As I was reading OP's story I flashbacked to my first introduction to technology at that age. I'm most grateful for them raising me intellectually curious, reading to me at a young age, and to never say no when I asked them to buy me a book. My father (84 now) is up to date with technology, he gets the mechanics and can perform his tasks (windows, android, roku) but I don't think he has a conceptual model of how any of this works. It was fascinating to me growing up, if you gave him a budget for buying a computer he could spec out the best "bang for your buck" knowing 8GB RAM > 4GB RAM and a 1Gig HD is > 500 MB HD without actually understanding what the components were. He was never interested in that level of detail, just show him how to click and do it.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

mistrial9 4y ago

this seems to me like a male equivalent of "8 year old girls in beauty pagents", honestly... At that tender cognitive age, the terminal is not the reality..

mlyle 4y ago
First-- hyperbole. Spending an hour with your dad tinkering with a terminal prompt is hardly the same as preparing for and entering a beauty pageant. My 8 year old doesn't sit at the terminal, but he sure likes going to Scratch and editing the computer games there... sometimes writing his own, but usually just finding amusing ways to cheat or make existing games do weird things. I wish it was a little easier to get into the "under the hood" stuff for kids. A whole lot of kids can do it and would enjoy it, but there's too many things with shallower learning curves in computers competing for attention. As far as "tender cognitive age"--- not everyone picks up the mental models and procedural thinking needed to be a decent programmer. A little bit of early exposure probably makes this more likely. Of course, too much of anything is bad.
- mistrial9 4y ago
  > My 8 year old doesn't sit at the terminal the title of this article, that I commented on, is literally "How many Linux commands can a 7 year old learn?"
  - mlyle 4y ago
    > the title of this article, that I commented on, is literally "How many Linux commands can a 7 year old learn?" Did you just willfully skip everything I said to focus on this? The article is about a kid who spent an hour, once, with his dad experimenting with a terminal. He's interested and curious and probably wants to do it again. I told you that my 8 year old doesn't sit at a terminal, but has spent a fair bit more than an hour doing a somewhat similar computing task. He's also hyper-social and well adapted dealing with other living beings.
ivanche 4y ago
I certainly didn't intend to sound that way! When my son asked me about the terminal, I didn't have an idea whether 2 minutes later he'll say "Dad this is boring" or I would have to pull him into bed an hour later because next day was a school day. It just turned out to be the second one and I felt the story was interesting enough to share it.

nont 4y ago

Don't teach him 'sudo' just yet :D sudo papa buy me a lego set

ivanche 4y ago
Lolz, he knows how to get that without sudo already :)

snvzz 4y ago

A lot of them, probably. That's about the age where I learned programming (with AmigaBASIC). At that point, I did already know a bunch of CLI commands, too. Kids can very easily get immersed into something. They also have a lot of free time.

napmo 4y ago

But why? There are more important things out there to teach to a 7 year old kid. Later, the kid can learn much faster, more important commands than simple 'ls' stuff. Life skills, math, sports and stuff like that are much more important and fun, compared to these simple commands.

klodolph 4y ago
If you always prioritize learning the "important" stuff, it's gonna suck the joy out of your life and your kid's life. Kids learn by imitating. If they see you learning the terminal, they ask you how to use it. The right thing to do is to show them.
- IE6 4y ago
  This basically explains how I began. My parents had DOS and Windows 3.11 machines and I wanted to get at the games. Eventually the games became boring and I explored the OS and other programs. This eventually turned into an IT career (after a decade or so of additional unimportant stuff).
fragmede 4y ago
I know! I'm so glad I didn't learn anything unimportant as a kid. My brain would have become all full up and it'd be too full to learn the important things later on.
asdff 4y ago
Because being able to use a computer to general purpose compute is helpful all over life. It's not a separate skill, its a tool. If you like math and sports you can use code to quickly run analytics on arbitrary data. Maybe you win the march madness bracket among your friends this year as a result or you start tracking interesting info on your personal skills. Maybe you can use some custom software to help you speed through a homework assignment in school, or you can opt to make some software and sell it on the side instead of flipping burgers for part time work while in school. Maybe you like cooking, now with programming you can write a scraper to collect recipes from these js heavy websites and store them into a local database not prone to bit rot. All people should be budgeting, and knowing how to code means you can easily roll your own budgeting software without having to deal with fees or the lack of features tailored to your own purposes from big commercial software. If you decide to run a small business, now you can handle your own web development, you can rope in services to run a storefront or track business analytics. maybe you are into gardening, now you can program a raspberry pi to water your plants for you whenever the soil starts to dry out or the weather calls for a lack of rain or some hot weather in the future. programming is a tool that you can apply to just about every facet of life and output any number of posibilities. Not having learned it earlier is my biggest regret. imo knowing how to program and really understand how a computer works should be seen as the reading and writing of our modern age. computer literacy is low in this world and that's dangerous, but i think the reason for this is people just don't often get exposed to programming unless they want to seek it out themselves. it's rare to have parents who know how to code or even schools that offer classes in coding, much less require it like english.

asdff 4y ago

Honestly the command line seems less conceptually challenging than having to learn a gui and all its abstractions first. Think of copying and pasting a file in mac os and explaining it to someone for the first time: "ok, now open finder. its in the dock. you have to move the mouse to the bottom of the screen. its the man with the face. ok now we need to get to the file. ok where did you put it? ok lets click to it. is that it? ok right click. lets find copy. great where is it going, click back, its the button up there, click back again, click it one more time, lets go forward again, ok in that folder, click on the name, no thats a triple click click somewhere else and lets try again, ok double click, ok now we are in, ok right click, paste." versus "type cp filefromyada toyada and press enter" A lot of people are so used to the GUI that they get scared of having to learn to walk again practically and diving into the cli. But if you never learned all the hoops and crap we have to deal with finagling stuff around a modern gui, I think you'd be able to do a lot more powerful things a lot faster starting with the cli from the beginning. I really wish I grew up learning the cli vs the gui, personally. guis also frequently change whereas the cli feels like its etched in stone (or you can use a container with whatever version of the stone you like)

lupire 4y ago
You skipped the part about learning what a directly path is, and how to find the names of all the subdirs in the paths.
- asdff 4y ago
  You could explain the file system hierarchy and how to built a path string with a sheet of paper and a pen and a minute or two. That part isn't the hard part of the cli IMO. When you want to find the names of the subdirs, then you introduce ls. Now you know two powerful command line tools, cp and ls, in a few minutes of explanation.
thereisnospork 4y ago
>"type cp filefromyada toyada and press enter" so hit the 't' key, followed by the 'y' key ,,, followed by the enter key to copy this file. While this is a trite example, how many linux how-do-I-do-this's get resolved with copy this command with half a dozen flags[0] into your terminal? The underlying problem with CLI is they lack information about the underlying structural logic and discoverability about the interaction. This makes it hard to impossible to extend 'copy this file' to 'open this file', or 'make this file read only'. In a (decent) GUI once 'left-click select' 'double-click open' and 'right-click options' is understood the rest is spelled out. Unlike with a CLI, where one needs to remember 'ls'[1] there are only two buttons on a mouse. I absolutely agree GUI changes - especially paradigm changes - are a plague though. [0]Which invariably seem to have a different obtuse formatting from the last command I had to copy. [1]Which stands for what anyway?

barefeg 4y ago

Very wholesome post! My three year old likes to play “work” (simulating what I do while working). He asks me to give instructions like click this menu then click this button then type this letter then that… look that says your name!

davewasthere 4y ago

I think it's pretty cool Vasa was up after 10pm learning cool stuff with his dad. Recently got my daughter into doing web application testing. She found four bugs in an hour. Trying stuff that I never thought of. I've created a monster. (She's getting paid, don't worry)

jojo14 4y ago

This is not quite surprising as I experienced a few times that kids understand pretty well a CLI rather than a GUI. As soon as they can read the concept of a REPL is rather straightforward for many so called computer "illiterates". Say something to the computer through writing it on the keyboard then wait for the processing of it and finally see the result displayed on the screen. Plus the history of commands is also very intuitive. Is it because it's all based on natural language faculties that we all possess as soon as we are born?

DavidSJ 4y ago

My son can’t touch type yet He might not be able to touch type, but now he can type touch.

ahthat 4y ago

Hilarious!!!

notorandit 4y ago

Linux commands? Bash/tcsh/zsh commands! There is no such a thing as "Linux command"!

jtvjan 4y ago
Aside from echo, the commands taught weren't builtins. If you want to be nitpicky, you could call them ‘coreutils commands’.

physicsguy 4y ago

I'm actually not surprised at all by this, because I was born in the early 90s. We got a Windows 98 computer when I was about 5, and I used to play DOS games on it all the time which had to be booted up by rebooting into DOS mode.

sylware 4y ago

I was exposed to such thing. The daughter of one of my exes, 13, was thrown at a face by a "teacher", raw IPv4 configuration with NAT *bsd/linux commands (no IP, no networking lectures, nothing), and the follow-up test asked her to do exactly that from a completely deconfigured network interface (if I recall properly). If among the parents' children there is someone competent, this teacher is going to get in trouble: because she was hopeless (stress, etc) and I would not expect otherwise. "Kobayashi Maru" of teaching?

pxeger1 4y ago
I don't understand what you mean by "was thrown at a face"

celdon25 4y ago

I knew a handful of DOS commands at the age of 3 (late 1980s). My father was smart enough not to include “del” among those.

oneeyedpigeon 4y ago

That's amazing progress for one hour — congratulations! > He goes on another spree of rm <something> I cant be the only one who was waiting for him to try `rm -rf /`, can I? ;) Seriously, though, give him his own account asap!

ivanche 4y ago
Thank you sir! Somehow I didn't think it was time for his own account, but hey, why not, I will give him a proper sandbox. I won't add him to sudoers file though :)

flerchin 4y ago

Hi Vasa, Hope you are having a great Tuesday and hope all is well! My name is flerchin, I am a technical recruiter for Amazon Web Services (AWS) and am hiring for Software Engineers looking for 100% fully remote roles. I’m reaching out because your experience and development background intrigued me and are in line with what we are looking for to help continue to build AWS. Especially your recent work would complement the AWS teams here and I know they would be interested in speaking to you.

andrew_ 4y ago
I can't tell if this is satire.
- nothrowaways 4y ago
  Vasa is the 7 year old's name :)
  - Handytinge 4y ago
    I know that, and I still can't tell.
ivanche 4y ago
Every LinkedIn recruiter, ever :)

andrew_ 4y ago

Kids are absolute sponges. I've got my three year old using a dozen or so different tools based on need (different screw drivers, wrenches aka spanners, and sockets). Actual tools that adults use, not the playset plastic variety. It's wild.

alt227 4y ago
Just an interested question. What need does a 3 year old have for adult tools?
- andrew_ 4y ago
  I have her out there changing my oil every 7k miles. She's small. Can shimmy under there without using jacks. It's aces. In all seriousness - use of physical tools teaches a myriad of skills. Just a few; hand-eye coordination, problem solving, visual spacial recognition. Children's toy brands like Melissa & Doug sell a wide variety of sets for development of these and other skills. Her using my tools is additional parental involvement and interaction, bonding time. Nothing but positives.

EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 4y ago

Thats about as many as I learned in my 60+ years. I received lifetime immunity against CLI during my time with VAX VMS and its storage room of reference foliants.

nickd2001 4y ago

One command appreciated by 7-yr olds is : touch poo