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It 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 fr
by EvilTerran 14y ago
It 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.
- EvilTerran 14y agoYeah, it's not like you can do strictly anything with a CLI, of course. An analogy that came to mind after I posted: a GUI is to a CLI what a buffet is to a well-stocked kitchen.
- geon 14y agoI absolutely agree that this minset is important, but I am not convinced it is helping to have your child use bash. The C64 era (which I was just barely part of), is gone. As much as I played games, loaded from tape with a "turbo loader", I don't think I neccesarily learned much from it. If we want to inspire our children to pearn by doing, we need a modern approach. For my son and doughter, I'm thinking an Arduino with some motors and leds will be great. I played around a lot with batteries and push buttons. Having the opportunity to control them with software just moght reward and interest them enough in programming to see how deep the rabbit hole goes. Bit If it doesn't, I'll be OK with that. I shouldn't push my interests on them. They will have to find their own.