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Many of our latest hires (new college grads) struggle with terminals and CLI in general. It seems like recently students have stopped getting this exposure whic

Many of our latest hires (new college grads) struggle with terminals and CLI in general. It seems like recently students have stopped getting this exposure which leads to them joining and not knowing how to ssh into a damn linux VM. It's a pretty daunting world.

heavyset_go 4y ago
I've talked with professors about this, and it seems that if students want to learn how to use the terminal, they need to figure it out themselves or take whatever UNIX/Linux-related classes that are offered, and those classes are usually electives and not required. Apparently some professors are leaning more and more on desktop & cloud IDEs, and other development platforms that just let students code and not worry about the rest. The argument is that abstracting away system administration allows teachers to spend more time on the content they need to teach versus spending time setting up and debugging systems.
- jll29 4y ago
  It is the job of the professors to create students that master the machines, not be slaves to them. We must raise a generation that creates worthy successors of systems like UNIX, X11, Emacs - instead of not mere derivatives. Having said that I concur it's true what you say, there isn't somewhere to go at many universities even if students are interested - the command line hasn't got much of a place in modern curricula - but recognizing that we must fight it (employers talking to deans helps a lot! Universities are more customer-oriented than ever in history).
- jrm4 4y ago
  Interesting. I perhaps nearly singlehandedly torpedoed one of these a few years back. I think I'm glad I did.
jll29 4y ago
It's upsetting to see how children's and young people's education gets dumbed down. I went to a toy shop earlier this week and the kits for scientific experiments (chemistry, electronics) have been dumbed down compared to the 1980s. Back then, you had a huge box with chemicals and tools and a proper 100+ page handbook full of experimental instructions (chemistry) or resistors, transistors capacitors etc, and a handbook full of design schemas that you may want to construct e.g. a little radios (electronics). Now you can do "20 safe experiments" like making a LED flash. In computing, students want to do their coursework on their iPad in a notebook environment, relying mostly on step-by-step instructions given as PDF file or from an online tutorial, based on copy & paste, without understanding what they paste there instead of compiling libraries or write a makefiles from scratch. Starting next summer, I will include a 2-3 hour UNIX command line (and also a 2-3 hour LaTeX) intro into all courses I teach where that can be justified. (The UNIX Power Tools [1] book is a useful resource for teaching, I found in the past.) [1] https://www.amazon.de/Unix-Power-Tools-Classique-Us/dp/0596003307 https://www.amazon.de/Unix-Power-Tools-Classique-Us/dp/05960...
- heavyset_go 4y ago
  > Starting next summer, I will include a 2-3 hour UNIX command line (and also a 2-3 hour LaTeX) intro into all courses I teach where that can be justified. (The UNIX Power Tools [1] book is a useful resource for teaching, I found in the past.) That's great to hear. If I were in a position to introduce students to the terminal, I'd also try to expose them to the existence some modern CLI tools so they don't feel like they're trapped in the 1970's. Something like Starship, tmux/byobu, enabling colors, exa/lsd for ls replacements, dust for a modern take on du, easy terminal editors like micro to ease students into editing text in the terminal, along with mentioning how Vim/Emacs can be used in places of editors/IDEs. They'll get to see that the terminal is both modern and relevant, with ample use of color, font weighting, emojis, images, text GUIs, window management via tmux, etc. I obviously wouldn't make that the focus, but as a quick aside about the tools they can use with some screenshots or screensharing my own terminal setup might keep some students interested.
jolmg 4y ago
> It seems like recently students have stopped getting this exposure Depends on what you mean by recent. I wouldn't expect exposure to have been greater 10-15 years ago. If anything, I would expect CLI exposure to be greater now compared to then, at least because of the rise of git.

heavyset_go 4y ago

I've talked with professors about this, and it seems that if students want to learn how to use the terminal, they need to figure it out themselves or take whatever UNIX/Linux-related classes that are offered, and those classes are usually electives and not required. Apparently some professors are leaning more and more on desktop & cloud IDEs, and other development platforms that just let students code and not worry about the rest. The argument is that abstracting away system administration allows teachers to spend more time on the content they need to teach versus spending time setting up and debugging systems.

jll29 4y ago
It is the job of the professors to create students that master the machines, not be slaves to them. We must raise a generation that creates worthy successors of systems like UNIX, X11, Emacs - instead of not mere derivatives. Having said that I concur it's true what you say, there isn't somewhere to go at many universities even if students are interested - the command line hasn't got much of a place in modern curricula - but recognizing that we must fight it (employers talking to deans helps a lot! Universities are more customer-oriented than ever in history).
jrm4 4y ago
Interesting. I perhaps nearly singlehandedly torpedoed one of these a few years back. I think I'm glad I did.

jll29 4y ago

It's upsetting to see how children's and young people's education gets dumbed down. I went to a toy shop earlier this week and the kits for scientific experiments (chemistry, electronics) have been dumbed down compared to the 1980s. Back then, you had a huge box with chemicals and tools and a proper 100+ page handbook full of experimental instructions (chemistry) or resistors, transistors capacitors etc, and a handbook full of design schemas that you may want to construct e.g. a little radios (electronics). Now you can do "20 safe experiments" like making a LED flash. In computing, students want to do their coursework on their iPad in a notebook environment, relying mostly on step-by-step instructions given as PDF file or from an online tutorial, based on copy & paste, without understanding what they paste there instead of compiling libraries or write a makefiles from scratch. Starting next summer, I will include a 2-3 hour UNIX command line (and also a 2-3 hour LaTeX) intro into all courses I teach where that can be justified. (The UNIX Power Tools [1] book is a useful resource for teaching, I found in the past.) [1] https://www.amazon.de/Unix-Power-Tools-Classique-Us/dp/0596003307 https://www.amazon.de/Unix-Power-Tools-Classique-Us/dp/05960...

heavyset_go 4y ago
> Starting next summer, I will include a 2-3 hour UNIX command line (and also a 2-3 hour LaTeX) intro into all courses I teach where that can be justified. (The UNIX Power Tools [1] book is a useful resource for teaching, I found in the past.) That's great to hear. If I were in a position to introduce students to the terminal, I'd also try to expose them to the existence some modern CLI tools so they don't feel like they're trapped in the 1970's. Something like Starship, tmux/byobu, enabling colors, exa/lsd for ls replacements, dust for a modern take on du, easy terminal editors like micro to ease students into editing text in the terminal, along with mentioning how Vim/Emacs can be used in places of editors/IDEs. They'll get to see that the terminal is both modern and relevant, with ample use of color, font weighting, emojis, images, text GUIs, window management via tmux, etc. I obviously wouldn't make that the focus, but as a quick aside about the tools they can use with some screenshots or screensharing my own terminal setup might keep some students interested.

jolmg 4y ago

> It seems like recently students have stopped getting this exposure Depends on what you mean by recent. I wouldn't expect exposure to have been greater 10-15 years ago. If anything, I would expect CLI exposure to be greater now compared to then, at least because of the rise of git.