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I introduced my 5yo and 2yo to startx and xmonad. They’re delighted.
- asdfdsa1234 14y agoO, wonder! How many goodly creatures are there here! How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world, That has such people in't!
- nicholassmith 14y agoThat's a fantastic idea, I think it should be a more common idea. The first 'proper' computer we had in the house when I was about 8 was a 3.1 box, which was great, but the guy who helped set it up as I watched spent most of the time diving through a Windows DOS prompt Getting It Done. I immediately spent more time in there than in a GUI, eventually discovering how limited it was and moving onto Linux. It taught me a lot, and I always feel a little sad that kids won't get that experience without awesome parents like this.
- timc3 14y agoJust think how happy they would be with an iPad or something like that. I think it's all relative, but it reminds me of that film "about a boy" where the kid was really happy to be receiving something at all. Also computers in the 80s - simple compared to even a raspberry pi
- bornhuetter 14y ago> Just think how happy they would be with an iPad or something like that. And they would learn absolutely nothing about computing. I think you missed the whole point of the article.
- ForrestN 14y agoWhich is what? That learning about computing is more important for children 5 and under than happiness?
- invalidOrTaken 14y agoAn iPad will not make you happy. Happiness comes from our relationships, our health, our work, our marriages, and our self-concept. Technology is necessary for none of these for children. With, that is, the possible exception of self-concept. "I know how computers work and how to use them" is a positive self-concept. Author is knocking the ball out of the park here.
- ForrestN 14y agoI didn't argue that an iPad will make you happy. Rather that it would make a very young child more engaged, more "delighted" and thus, a bit happier, than would a command line interface. As I said elsewhere, it seems even more preferable for kids that young to mostly skip all of the above.
- jgoerzen 14y agoI disagree. A blank command line is freedom. It's an invitation to do whatever you like. To discover. To try. To fail. To explore. If you have 5 (or 50) icons to choose from, where's the blank slate? Where's the great outdoors? Where's the "I built it myself!"? The boys love to eat the food from our garden that they helped plant and nurture a lot more than food from a store. If they have ownership and freedom to explore, engagement is natural. If you don't start with the preconceived notion that the command line is too hard or not engaging enough for children, maybe you will find that it isn't.
- icebraining 14y agoI love the CLI and spend much more time in it than in every other UI, but I was a Windows user for years, where I barely used it, and I still felt all of that. My blank slate was an empty text file in Notepad and a browser (this was on a public computer, I couldn't install stuff). On the iPad, I'd say the blank slate is Codea: http://twolivesleft.com/Codea/ http://twolivesleft.com/Codea/
- ef4 14y ago
- timc3 14y agoThat just not true. There is plenty to learn from a computing device of any type. The best thing I find to learn is that they are not endless gaming playing machines but you can create things on them. The iPad allows for that
- keithpeter 14y ago"When I sat down to think about it, the typical GUI design does not present a very good “it always works the same” interface that would be good for a child." See RISC OS, the old Acorn Computers UI. It was designed exactly this way. Back to the present, would Sugar be any good for these two? Seems 'monotonous' in the Raskin sense and child freindly.
- glhaynes 14y agoI've never gotten to use RISC OS; could you say a little more about what you mean? Just that it was very consistent?
- keithpeter 14y agoYup, one way of doing each action. Was designed to be used by primary school children and the networked versions administered by primary teachers.
- dbaupp 14y agoI love reading about the adventures of Jacob and his computer (and Oliver too!). These stories pop up on planet.haskell.org and they always make my day!
- ThomPete 14y agoGreat and inspiring piece (I have a 3 year old) but I disagree with this: And then it occurred to me: the perfect GUI for a child would be simply xmonad (a tiling window manager that can be controlled almost entirely by keyboard and has no need for mouse movements in most cases. The perfect UI for a child and for all other people unfamiliar with a computer all in all is the touch screen. The reason why the children have problems with the icons being too small and accidental dragging is because the mouse represents an extra layer of abstraction. If you think about it your brain goes horisontal to vertical and not even in a one to one relationship.
- mibbitier 14y ago> The perfect UI for a child and for all other people unfamiliar with a computer all in all is the touch screen. Agree. Android phone, or iPad. Amazingly easy for kids to use. I'm skeptical that teaching kids starting with a command line is always a good approach.
- hellweaver666 14y agoSeconded. My son was playing basic educational games on my wife's iPhone from about 8 months. He's nearly two now and uses the iPad without an issue, switching apps, watching shows. He even knows how to open iPlayer and find his favourite BBC kids shows. Never ceases to amaze me.
- bitwize 14y agoMy first computer interface was a command line. I was five. **** CBM BASIC V2 **** 3583 BYTES FREE READY. I learned that by telling things to the computer (via the keyboard), it would obey commands or remember information. This actually isn't terribly hard for a kid to grasp, though this level of sophistication probably won't work with a kid who's much younger than 5 or 6.
- timc3 14y agoExactly, when my 2.5 year old uses our iPad, she is actually using it - watching videos, looking at photos.
- ww2 14y agoI feel sick to read this. The kids learned the world in a twisted way. I really think kids should know how transistor work before work on computer. Otherwise he took too much unreal things for granted.
- coreygoodie 14y agoYou really think it's feasible for a 2 year old to have an idea how a transistor works when all they want to do is watch videos of kitties and puppies on YouTube?
- monkeyfacebag 14y agoI have a feeling that parent's comment was intended as a joke.
- ww2 14y agostarx/xmonad push this to a limit.It is just much more not feasible.
- troygoode 14y agoI believe ww2 was facetiously pointing out that the father in this piece chose to introduce his kids to an arbitrary point in the abstraction chain under the premise that anything higher is hiding too much of the implementation. That said, while you could try and have your 2 year old build ENIAC out of from-scratch vacuum tubes I doubt you'll have much luck - I'm pretty surprised at the degree of success the author had with text terminals at that age, to be honest. As the father of a nearly-2-year-old this definitely has my gears turning...
- coreygoodie 14y agoAnd here I was playing with Legos as a tot.
- jlgreco 14y agoI think it is likely a pretty solid idea to not teach kids how digital circuits and whatnot work, but rather to tell them. Make them aware that the knowledge of how they work is out there. Humans have a tendency to fill in gaps in their knowledge with superstition, though even the most basic of naturalistic frameworks should be sufficient to keep that tendency under control.
- jiggy2011 14y agoThis isn't especially surprising, I probably learned to use command line when I wasn't much older. That wasn't because I was some genius, just that this was the only way to use a computer at the time. There seems to be a popular misconception that a command line interface represents some kind of advanced brain surgery when in fact for many tasks it's simply easier. I have done tech support jobs a few times in my life and it's a lot easier to guide someone in using a command line than it is a GUI "Click on Edit , click on Tools , Click the "advanced" tab , right click on the picture of a gear, now drag this thing into that place on the left" vs "type this in exactly how I dictate it". Also CLI tends to be more predictable, I've seen so many people's computers where they've accidentally dragged interface elements all over the place and have no idea how to find anything.
- ThomPete 14y agoI think you are underestimating how few people actually would do such a thing at a young age.
- jiggy2011 14y agoHow many people would do which thing?
- ThomPete 14y agoLearn the command line at a very young age.
- jiggy2011 14y agoWe all did, there were GUIs available at the time (Win 3.1) but most good games ran from a command line interface, you could get quite a long way just understanding the "dir" and "cd" commands. The biggest thing stopping people from using computers at that point in time seemed to be how expensive they were rather than that we had difficultly getting them to work.
- sgt 14y agoWhen I have children, I also want to do things like these. I have a bunch of old Sun computers that I want to expose them to, not to mention an Amiga 1200 and a SGI O2.
- dfc 14y agoI am not a parent so as far as childhood development goes I'm completely ignorant. Is it normal for a 3-5 year old to have the literacy skills to interact with a text+keyboard interface?
- pnathan 14y agoMy wife and I both were reading by the time we were 5. It's very fluid though: some people do, some people don't. Strangely, children tend to be very divergent in capability at early ages, then they tend to normalize as they get older. At least, that's what people with lots of experience with kids tell me. :-)
- mahmud 14y agoditto. I wrote my first love letter at age 5 and my mother delivered it to the girl's family, who took it and read it to her, because the poor child was only 5 years old and couldn't read herself. LOL!
- corin_ 14y agoIt depends on the child and their environment, I would hazard a guess at saying that any child brought up in a home where parents are going to show them a unix terminal is definitely going to be literate enough already. Many others would be, too. (At 5, certainly - 3 I know less about..)
- brudgers 14y agoWhat's normal is children doing just about anything to please their parents. What's also normal is parents living vicariously through their children. It's the whole two-year-olds-in-tierras-pagent meme nerdified.
- nemo1618 14y agoSadly, if there was a show called "Kiddies and Command Lines," sites like reddit would probably eat it up. Parents should let their kids discover what they like, not force their own preferences on them.
- ExxKA 14y agoSweet story. I cant help thinking whether all of these experiences would have seemed completely natural to your kids if they had been presented with a GUI from day one. And if it would, would that make it easier to learn more, or if the excitement from switching to a GUI is really what they needed to tackle a steep learning curve.
- citricsquid 14y ago> I didn’t want our boys to skip an entire phase of learning how their technology works I don't think they're necessarily learning "how technology works", what they are learning is that they have control and can interact in different ways. I think that will be the most valuable thing in the future. Hacking is all about taking something and using it in different ways to "normal", teaching this concept from very early on (by introducing multiple interfaces) will be a great way to ensure in the future that they understand problems have multiple solutions and that technology works for them.
- executive 14y agoexactly. OP is a careless parent setting his spawn up for mediocrity. If he really wanted to teach the kids how tech works, he would have them write device drivers to interact with the mouse hardware.
- EvilTerran 14y agoIt seems to me that starting on a GUI, or even more so on a touchscreen, teaches the mindset of "My computer tells me a bunch of things it can do. I pick one from the available selection." Meanwhile, the CLI has a very different underlying message: "My computer asks me what I want it to do. I can tell it to do pretty much anything." That strikes me as the real value in teaching CLI use at an early age -- it reinforces the idea that your computer can do whatever you want it to do, not just whatever it was set up to do when you got it. That's a very important lesson, particularly in these days when so many of the big players in technology seem keen for consumers to forget it.
- jiggy2011 14y agoWell command lines can be quite stubborn when they don't want to do something. CLIs were more interesting to poke at though and allowed you to be much more specific about what you wanted to happen. For example say you want to move all of your .mpg files from all subfolders of a particular folder recursively to another specific folder this is generally a lot easier with a CLI. CLIs also don't tend to change very much, I've been using Linux for over 10 years and been through godknowshowmany window managers but I've never had to re-learn the CLI stuff.
- wildtype 14y agoTo use commandline, we must be can read and write. I even can't read when i'm 6 yo.
- TamDenholm 14y agoOne of the coolest things i remember doing as a kid was sitting on an acorn computer and writing some text that then controlled a Lego robot. I didn't know it at the time but that was my first exposure to programming. It's really great when a kid gets massively excited about learning how to make things work whether it's a computer or something else.
- lifeisstillgood 14y agoReading the story, and the comments, there seems to be a disconnect between why the kids were delighted - it is not that they are delighted about Linux or XMonad. Or that they are learning valuable life skills. They are delighted to be spending time with dad. Doing something fun, that dad seems engaged in. As a dad, too much time seems to go on the mundane or the boring. Raising up the enthusiasm level, is a marvellous thing for dads and kids. It does not matter if that is installing Linux, writing blog posts, foraging for mushrooms, bird-watching or football. Plus one for spending quality time with the kids. what we actually do it seems is less important than doing it. Enjoy Edit: clarity
- ThomPete 14y agoExactly! I could be screwing in a screw and my son would enjoy it and be delighted about it.
- wccrawford 14y agoI remember watching my dad fix things when I was young, and I can confirm that this is indeed the case. It didn't matter what he was doing, I wanted to be watching. Carpentry, ditch-digging, vehicle repairs... It just didn't matter what. I can't remember how many times he said, "Don't play where people are working." Also, (to Mom): "How many times have I told you not to put my tools away before I'm done working?" Ahh, the memories.
- lifeisstillgood 14y agoHandy Manny is a household favourite :-)
- exim 14y agoYup. But then, nobody would post that story on HN :)
- njx 14y agoMy son enjoys whatever I am doing, be it gardening, fixing something in the house. It amazes me that by just watching me he has become quite a handymanny himself
- ForrestN 14y agoAm I the only one that feels a little queasy reading this? First of all: I think it's great to be teaching your kids about how computers function at a basic level. I think it's cool and admirable that his kids can use a command line. But the very evidence presented in this article suggests that he's repressing his children from having more fun, more "delight" than they're able to looking at a bunch of text. They're so excited by the visual interface because all young children are excited by stimulating visuals. The (admittedly poorly written) comment which is currently at the bottom of the thread points out exactly what I was thinking. Imagine how excited, how delighted, these kids would be with all of the possibilities afforded by an iPad. The diverse critical development opportunities and perceptual stimuli would seem to far outweigh the advantages of being able to think like a programmer or whatever. And, it would just be so much more fun for them, in my opinion.
- asdfdsa1234 14y agoImagine how much more fun they could have painting instead of using tuxpaint. Learning how to interact with objects that aren't keyboards, mice, or lcds may benefit them in other ways as well. Edit: In light of other comments by jgoerzen, this comment misses the mark.
- ForrestN 14y agoAgreed. Children's development has been tuned by ages and ages according to a world full of stimuli. The reason kids seems to go for iPads is because they are more like the actual world. You touch them, they react.
- bornhuetter 14y agoKids love TV, why bother teaching them to read useless outdated books? TV shows are visual and auditory, so much more like the real world.
- ForrestN 14y agoI didn't argue that kids should use iPads instead of the real world. I think it may be better that they don't use computers at all. I was merely suggesting that an iPad might be better for them than a command line interface.
- seanp2k2 14y agoI wish they'd teach Linux in school, starting from the kernel, instead of this "how to use MS Office" tripe that passes for "computer science" here in the states.
- neutronicus 14y agoNot that I entirely disagree, but the English teacher couldn't care less whether his/her charges understand, well, anything about Linux, but the English teacher cares a great deal whether his/her charges can manage 1-inch margins and double-spacing on whichever word processor is currently winning the mindshare war.
- 3pt14159 14y agoI still do not understand this. If I were an English teacher I would tell my students to email me the assignment with the following format Subject: Assignment 1 - Larry Jones - Romeo and Juliet Meets Robots Body: [5 paragraphs of text] Or even better would be for them to have it on a blog, so you get social pressure to do well. Parents might not go for that one though. Why do we need to be good at margins, double spacing, etc. When was the last time I needed to change the margins on a Word doc? 3 months ago? Waste of time/resources.
- petitmiam 14y agoI think it was so the teacher could write comments on the pages more easily. That was 10 years ago though, so I'm not sure if students still have to hand in printed hard copies?
- unimpressive 14y ago>That was 10 years ago though, so I'm not sure if students still have to hand in printed hard copies? They do. Schools are really backwards on this sort of thing.
- drivebyacct2 14y ago
- seanp2k2 14y agoI wish they'd teach Linux in school, starting from the kernel, instead of this "how to use MS Office" tripe that passes for "computer science" here in the states.
- jroseattle 14y agoThis is a good story, although there are some thoughts that come to mind when I consider what's happening. It seems as though GUI environments are being treated as second-class citizens. While I live and breathe my command line as I have for years, GUI interfaces run the world. As long as the kids learn GUI interactivity at some point, they'll be better prepared for the world. But the excitement those kids are getting is that feeling of control, of if-I-do-this-then-that-will-happen, which is a powerful motivator. startx and xmonad can offer a simplicity that would very much appeal to young kids interacting with a computer. All in all, good for Dad and kiddos. They like doing those things, and Dad is focused on helping them succeed. A winning combination.
- jasimq 14y agoI think that modern OS GUI has helped increase productivity. Not giving your kids exposure to a modern OS means that your kid would be playing catch up with other kids when exposed to one, say, in school. A person's job prospects may also be limited if they don't know, or are not comfortable with, what the majority uses
- scribu 14y agoYou can get familiar with a mainstream operating system pretty fast so I don't find the "they'll lag behind" argument too convincing. If you can learn how to run first, it should be pretty darn easy to learn how to walk afterwards.
- ef4 14y agoWe're talking about a five-year-old here. I think it's absurd to think that any of us know what a mainstream productivity OS is going to look like by the time it affects his "job prospects". At that age, what matters isn't any of the material learned. It's the attitudes and self-conceptions that matter. If a five-year-old learns that he likes telling computers what to do and that he can get steadily better at it by exploring, that's a huge win for his future.
- jgoerzen 14y agoThe last version of Windows I used seriously was 3.1. Last winter, I suddenly had to fix problems in Windows Server 2008. I may have been a bit slow, but yes, I can fix an OS I've never used. If you have a good knowledge base, and the experience to provide a good intuition, you can figure them out. I would, incidentally, consider Debian to be a modern OS, and a CLI to be a modern UI. If they can string together commands in bash, I'm sure they'll be just fine with Windows.
- f0untain 14y agoThis is so depressing. All these nerd dads are trying to break some kind of record by saying "look my kid can do this at age X". Please consult development psychologist before you stuff your toddler's brain with such garbage. They need to play with physical objects, music, colors, food. go out and have fun. There is plenty of time to learn shell.
- 10098 14y ago> I helped him them in as root for the very first time. Aww, this is so adorable :-)
- millerfung 14y agoThis is really awesome and I finish the whole article. I am 21 now, having almost graduating from a finance degree now and I started to learn coding, there are just way too many things in my head that I want to build. I keep a journal for all my ideas and hopefully one day I build all of them. The excitement is just awesome! I have done some investing and trading and I thought it was my favourite to do but then no...I am like new born now!
- papsosouid 14y agoOuch, teaching kids to log in as root. Bad dad, bad! Teach them sudo and explain that you were possessed by the devil when you mentioned root before, and to forget all about that.
- gcb 14y agoRemember when i was 3 and typed commands on a XT to run games (Sokoban, etc) Learned to use dir and cd by just watching my father doing stuff. Soon i took more fun exploring other files than playing the games
- munin 14y agowhen I started using linux, I went through two phases. the first one was marked by knowing, generally, which commands to invoke from the command line to make the computer do what I want. I had very little idea of what was going on in the operating system and the userspace runtime, and it didn't matter because the creators of the OS and runtime were smart and the system behaved sensibly. I thought I knew what was going on, I had this feeling that I was in control of the computer, but really I wasn't, I was just as much at the mercy of the operating system maintainers as I was when I ran Windows. If a command line program reported an error or crashed, the procedure to fix it was identical to the one on Windows: ask your friends, or search the Internet. It was only after many years of doing system level programming that I was actually able to fix problems that the original tool creators did not anticipate. I think many people park themselves in front of a command line for five minutes, "learn bash", and think "hooray I am in charge of the computer". You're not.
- daemon13 14y agoMy son is 1 year 10 mths old. To people with actual experience - when to start showing cli?
- jgoerzen 14y agoHere's what I'd suggest. Find an old keyboard, one you don't mind taking some abuse. Plug it in to a computer somewhere, put it in a 80x25 text mode where the letters are nice and big. Then log in and let them bash at it randomly to their heart's desire. They'll be able to make lights on the keyboard turn on and off, and see the effect on the screen of what they do on the keyboard. It might only last a few minutes at first, and that's fine. Once they can recognize letters pretty reliably, they could start with some simple CLI things. At almost 3, Oliver can log himself in, but I usually have to point to each letter in his username before he hits it. He knows his letters, but not his QWERTY, yet. He also has some issues with repeating letters. But once he's logged in, it's mostly random mashing at the keyboard for him yet too. I bet it won't be for long though. As to age, each child is different. Follow their cues. If they happily sit on your lap for 15 minutes, seriously studying, or laughing at the hilarious error messages they make, then it's time. Or if they start wanting to use your computer. If they run off after 30 seconds, try again in a month or two.
- daemon13 14y agoJohn, thank you for excellent advice! Will try this approach. I allways stumbled when my son was drumming the keyboard with all apps open, feeling uneasy that he could do some damage. Please continue with BabyHacks series.
- thisisstupid 14y agoWhat's your address? I'm calling social services.
- daemon13 14y agoCan someone explain in simple words what is xmonad? Is it used together with X? Instead of gnome or xfce? Or instead of X?
- tikhonj 14y agoIt's a window manager. That is, all it does is draw and position windows for your programs. It serves the same role as KWin in KDE or Metacity in Gnome. There are some important differences between XMonad and normal window managers. In XMonad, you cannot drag windows around and they cannot overlap. Instead, the windows are positioned automatically and can be controlled with some simple keyboard commands. Additionally, XMonad lets you configure its behavior--how it lays its windows out--with Haskell, a very nice functional programming language. You can use XMonad with an existing environment like Gnome; you would then have tiling windows that do not overlap with all of the normal Gnome features you're used to. However, XMonad can also run alone for a more minimal environment where you do not have extra panels and menus and use the keyboard much more often than the mouse. Everybody I know that has used XMonad really likes it. It really makes you more productive by managing windows for you--you don't have to drag them yourself. If you have some spare time, you should try it out and learn the basics. It's also a good excuse to learn Haskell, which is an insanely awesome language and great fun.
- zobzu 14y agoim tired of these "1mo old discover the theory of relativity" articles and it the best thing evar. can't we actually evolve a little bit?
- ericssmith 14y agoI have a 34month old and 4yo, and this has inspired me to give them a old machine tonight. They will love 'sl'. I will also try the xmonad and tuxpaint stuff with the 4yo. She will like having her own computer and will be tickled to be 'working' like Daddy. They use an iPad sometimes, but I'll be interested to see how they feel about typing on keys and using a trackpad to paint with (the mouse doesn't get used).
- jgoerzen 14y agoI would love to hear how they react. I'm excited for you just reading this!
- ericssmith 14y agoThe 4 yo was excited about getting a computer, but didn't care at all about using it. She just didn't 'get' the steam locomotive. She was willing to participate (and was interested) in typing characters on the screen and having something happen, but I just didn't have enough at an appropriate level to maintain her interest. I had hoped to work up to the gui and tuxpaint, but we didn't get that far before she completely gave up. I think there would've been (general) merit in this approach, but there's just not enough command line apps that are suited to this age group. The 2yo could also make the train go, but he didn't recognize it as a train. It was probably too fast to decipher the ascii art. Somewhat strangely, starting the following day, the 4yo started calling her fake baby cell phone a 'computer' and is really in to pretending to do things on it. Crazy stuff like talking about how well she's doing at playing videos games. We don't play any video games in our house. It's as though I unlocked some possibility of having her own computer and her mind is running with it.
- shirro 14y agoMy 4.5yo has been using iOS since a bit before 2, has his own ipod touch and uses the family 1st gen iPad. He came home from kindy excited by using a PC. I couldn't understand it but now I do. Kids love to learn and he needs new challenges and this is another thing I can do with him. I have been waiting until he has better literacy to start on the cli, but perhaps the cli will help him learn letters and typing. Nice one.
- jaredstenquist 14y agoI was born in 84 and have a lot of fond memories with Windows 3.1, solitaire and the progression of computer games as I grew up. I sincerely hope this father kids his kids out of the house and into the backyard to make friends, built forts, break things, and all the other awesomeness I experienced as a kid growing up. If my dad started putting me in front of a terminal when I was 2 or 3, I'm nervous how I would have ended up. Because I received my first programming book (HTML in 24 hours) when I was 13, I had plenty of years to learn to code, but didn't sit inside while all the other kids were playing for 13 years. Now I'm coding everyday, having a blast at my startup, and my best friends today are the kids from my neighborhood that I was building forts and setting off fireworks with 20 years ago.
- jgoerzen 14y agoAbsolutely I do. See my blog for examples. The other stuff is more important than the computer, and they spend far more time outside than they do at the computer. One of their favorite activities is to build their own river systems using a slow trickle of water out of a hose & pipe onto a small mound of dirt.
- noonespecial 14y agoI got my 8 year old an arduino, so I'm secretly taking him through Kernighan and Ritchie. Each night I teach him a new little snippet and the next day he'll run with it. Its fascinating to watch as he takes the concept and pushes it as far as it will possibly go, ending in a massive barely working kludge... and then the next night we learn a few new lines that make it all simple and easy and its sheer joy. Its like watching Peter Parker get spider powers. Just learning that programs could be broken into callable functions was a moment of stand up, open mouthed wonder. Don't wait. Do this with your kids now.
- jgoerzen 14y agoAwesome. That is a wonderful idea.
- peterkelly 14y agoMy experience has been that the earlier in life that someone is introduced to a technology, the easier it is for them to learn it. Kids these days pick up computers and the Internet very quickly, while many older people (esp. 60+) struggle to understand it. I think this is largely just a property of the human brain - our capacity to learn new things decreases with age. I was fortunate enough to have a father who did pretty much the same thing as this guy. Growing up in the 80s, I was introduced to the DOS command-line, BASIC, Turbo pascal, building and upgrading my own computers, etc. I distinctly remember the day when I was 8 years old and asked my father, with no prompting, "Dad, how do you make programs?". This was 24 years ago and pretty much every day since then I've been working with computers in some form or another, completing three CS degrees, teaching the subject at university, and starting my own software company. I'm pretty sure none of this would have happened if it wasn't for my father. As a CS lecturer I've seen some students who come into the first year courses having never written a line of code before in their lives, and others who were writing their own games all through high school. While there are some exceptions, the latter group tend to do far better at their studies and also often just naturally do their own projects outside of formal study, which IMHO is critical for learning the subject properly. I think getting kids into the technical aspects of computers at an early age gives them a tremendous head start over their peers who are playing Xbox and angry birds on their iPad. This guy is giving his kids two of the most important gifts of all - education and inspiration, of the sort they'll never get in school.
- andyobryan 14y agoI don't have my own children yet, but hope to some day. Thanks for the story and a lesson on good parenting. Nice to read such stories in today's world of doom and gloom.