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As a young Linux user I always hated the experimentation aspect because usually it meant just straight up getting the command wrong 5 times before trying to rea

by d-us-vb 9mo ago

As a young Linux user I always hated the experimentation aspect because usually it meant just straight up getting the command wrong 5 times before trying to read the man page, thinking I understood what the man page meant, trying again another 5 times and then giving up. This idea of experimenting and getting instant feedback is just survivorship bias for a certain type of person, not “the way we ought to teach Unix shell” This view is corroborated by the research summarized and presented in the programmer’s brain by Felienne Hermans.

nomadygnt 9mo ago
Maybe I am wrong about this but I think a lot of recent research has shown that trial and error is a great way to learn almost everything. Even just making an educated guess, even if it is completely wrong, before learning something makes it much more likely that you remember and understand the thing that you learn. It’s a painful and time-consuming way to learn. But very effective. Maybe Linux commands is a little different but I kinda doubt it. Errors and feedback are the way to learn, as long as you can endure the pain of getting to the correct result.
- JamesTRexx 9mo ago
  Trial and error was the root of what became my IT career. I became curious about what each executable did from DOS and with that did my first tweaking of autoexec.bat and config.sys to maximise memory. Years later I was the only one who could investigate network (and some other) problems in Windows via the command line while I was the junior of the team. Ended up being the driver of several new ways of working for the department and company.
  - raddan 9mo ago
    Ditto. I found that people whose attitude was “let’s just try it” tended to be a lot more capable and effective. Nevertheless the prevailing wisdom when I was in IT was that if you had a problem that didn’t have an obvious solution, you had to purchase the solution.
    - lotu 9mo ago
      Sounds very profitable for whoever is selling solutions, I wonder if perhaps they also provide wisdom as a loss leader.
- cheesecakegood 9mo ago
  Needs qualification. Research shows trial and error learning is very durable, but it’s not the most time efficient (in fact it’s relatively poor, usually, on that front). The two concepts are a bit different. Yes, trial and error engages more of the brain and provides a degree of difficulty that can sometimes be helpful in making the concepts sticky, but well designed teaching coupled with meaningful and appropriately difficult retrieval and practice is better on most axes. When possible… good teaching often needs refinement. And you’d be surprised how many educators know very little about the neuroscience of learning!
  - zahlman 9mo ago
    > And you’d be surprised how many educators know very little about the neuroscience of learning! I'm (pleasantly) surprised every time I see evidence of one of them knowing anything about it.
    - raddan 9mo ago
      At the university level in the US, few faculty get any kind of training before they are expected to start teaching. And the teaching requirement is more or less “do no harm.” If you’re at a research university, which includes many publicly funded universities, then your career trajectory is based almost exclusively on your research output. I could go on, but it suffices to say that it’s not surprising that the teaching could be better. That said, most institutions have teacher training resources for faculty. I was fortunate to be able to work intensely with a mentor for a summer, and it improved my teaching dramatically. Still, teaching is hard. Students sometimes know—but often don’t know—what is best for their learning. It’s easy to conflate student satisfaction with teaching effectiveness. The former is definitely an important ingredient, but there’s a lot more to it, and a really effective teacher knows when to employ tools (eg quizzes) that students really do not like. I am frequently amused by the thought that here we have a bunch of people who have paid tons of money, set aside a significant fraction of their time, and nominally want to learn a subject that they signed up for; and yet, they still won’t sit down and actually do the reading unless they are going to be quizzes on it.
- d-us-vb 9mo ago
  Trial and error is necessary and beneficial, but not after the student becomes frustrated or anxious/bewildered by the complexity. The research shows that striking a balance between teacher intervention and trial and error is the optimal approach. If a teacher notices that a student is way off course but they keep persisting in one branch of the trial-and-error search space, it’ll be best if they intervene and put the student on the right branch. The student can still use the knowledge of what wasn’t working to find the solution on the right branch, but just persisting would be ineffective. Gaining true understanding/insight is necessarily trial and error. Teachers cannot teach insight. But they can present the optimal path to gain insight.
shakna 9mo ago
I'd add nuance to Hermans' work. Its not all experiment blind, but also not feedback-less. They advocate for "direct instruction", not just rote learning. > As that is not a surprise, since research keeps showing that direct instruction—explanation followed by a lot of focused practice—works well. Note the "lot of focused practice". [0] https://www.felienne.com/archives/6150 https://www.felienne.com/archives/6150
- raddan 9mo ago
  There’s a pretty rich literature around this style of pedagogy going back for decades and it is certainly not a new idea. My preferred formulation is Vygotsky’s “zone of proximal development” [1], which is the set of activities that a student can do with assistance from a teacher but not on their own. Keeping a student in the ZPD is pretty easy in a one-on-one setting, and can be done informally, but it is much harder when teaching a group of students (like a class). The. Latter requires a lot more planning, and often leans on tricks like “scaffolded” assignments that let the more advanced students zoom ahead while still providing support to students with a more rudimentary understanding. Direct instruction sounds similar but in my reading I think the emphasis is more on small, clearly defined tasks. Clarity is always good, but I am not sure that I agree that smallness is. There are times, particularly when students are confused, that little steps are important. But it is also easy for students to lose sight of the goals when they are asked to do countless little steps. I largely tuned out during my elementary school years because class seemed to be entirely about pointless minutiae. By contrast, project work is often highly motivational for students, especially when projects align with student interests. A good project keeps a student directly in their ZPD, because when they need your help, they ask. Lessons that normally need a lot of motivation to keep students interested just arise naturally. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zone_of_proximal_development https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zone_of_proximal_development
robocat 9mo ago
> usually it meant just straight up getting the command wrong 5 times before trying to read the man page, thinking I understood what the man page meant, trying again another 5 times I think that is a developer's superpower. The poncy term for it is grit. I tell others that the secret to leaning computers is frustration and persistence. > and then giving up. Knowing when to stop or change direction is hard. I've definitely wasted years of work failing to solve something that I eventually had to give up on (most memorably depending on nasty Microsoft products). But I've also been paid very nicely because I've solved problems that others struggled with. And I was paid for the failures too.
- snowmobile 9mo ago
  I consider myself a fairly good developer, and I think that's in large part due to knowing, "doing this should be possible, and the reason it's not working right now is just due to stupidity (my own or the developer of whatever I'm using's)". But yes, in a few (thankfully rare) cases it just plain isn't practically possible. Even then, I've given up on problems just to have it nagging in the back of my mind and then randomly coming up with a beautifully simple solution weeks later. That's sort of the essence of what I like about programming (and math too).
- jama211 9mo ago
  Grit is something you gain once you already have an intrinsic motivation, such as already having a belief you can do this. Something has to spark in people that they’re capable in the first place.
  - godelski 9mo ago
    People forget that struggling is part of the learning process. It's great that people want to make things easier to learn, but struggling is essential. You want to ensure that people don't struggle so much they get stuck (one extreme), but you don't want to make it so easy people don't struggle at all (the other extreme). There's balance, but that balance requires struggling.
    - 9mo ago
inopinatus 9mo ago
I'm trying to remember being a young Unix user but it was four decades ago, so the details become hazy. Nevertheless the proper go-to after the manpage fails to clarify matters is the same as it ever was, that is, one reads the source code, if you have it, and this is easier today than ever.
vacuity 9mo ago
I'd like to add that, while anything will have some learning friction, learning the Unix CLI is rather unnecessarily painful.
- raddan 9mo ago
  I’m curious: what do you see as unnecessary about the CLI? Or, to put it another way, in what way should the CLI be changed so that the only remaining difficulties are the necessary ones?
  - vacuity 9mo ago
    I'm not qualified to give a complete answer, but I think two main issues are the proliferation of flags in standard tools (e.g. ls has a lot of flags for sorting behavior) and the extreme preference for plain text. Text is very useful, but a lot of semantic information gets discarded. Representing structured data is painful, stdin/stdout/stderr are all in one place, window resizing makes a mess sometimes (even "write at end of line" isn't given), and so on. I'm definitely not qualified to describe just how to fix these issues, though.
    - raddan 9mo ago
      I think you hit the nail on the head. Plaintext is universal in a way that nothing else really is. Outputting structured data means that consumers would have to process structured data. That definitely raises the difficulty of the programming. It’s not an easy problem, but I also do not have any good ideas.
- trashb 9mo ago
  I actually feel like the Unix/Gnu CLI is quite nice (yes I'm used to it already). I feel like it provides a lot of consistency through community standardization and standardization through POSIX and libraries. For example it's quite difficult to find a program that breaks the "-o --option" long/short options and if you do the "man command" or "info command" pages will tell you how to use a program. In my experience this is quite different on for example Windows. Learning it is a step but once you've learned the basics you can read 90% of the commands.
pmontra 9mo ago
Getting a pipeline wrong 5 times is common. The normal process is: write a couple of steps, right output! Add a grep, bad output! Fix it, again, again, right output! Add cut -bM-N, adjust the boundaries a few times. Sort the output. Oops, sort -n

by d-us-vb 9mo ago

nomadygnt 9mo ago

Maybe I am wrong about this but I think a lot of recent research has shown that trial and error is a great way to learn almost everything. Even just making an educated guess, even if it is completely wrong, before learning something makes it much more likely that you remember and understand the thing that you learn. It’s a painful and time-consuming way to learn. But very effective. Maybe Linux commands is a little different but I kinda doubt it. Errors and feedback are the way to learn, as long as you can endure the pain of getting to the correct result.

JamesTRexx 9mo ago
Trial and error was the root of what became my IT career. I became curious about what each executable did from DOS and with that did my first tweaking of autoexec.bat and config.sys to maximise memory. Years later I was the only one who could investigate network (and some other) problems in Windows via the command line while I was the junior of the team. Ended up being the driver of several new ways of working for the department and company.
- raddan 9mo ago
  Ditto. I found that people whose attitude was “let’s just try it” tended to be a lot more capable and effective. Nevertheless the prevailing wisdom when I was in IT was that if you had a problem that didn’t have an obvious solution, you had to purchase the solution.
  - lotu 9mo ago
    Sounds very profitable for whoever is selling solutions, I wonder if perhaps they also provide wisdom as a loss leader.
cheesecakegood 9mo ago
Needs qualification. Research shows trial and error learning is very durable, but it’s not the most time efficient (in fact it’s relatively poor, usually, on that front). The two concepts are a bit different. Yes, trial and error engages more of the brain and provides a degree of difficulty that can sometimes be helpful in making the concepts sticky, but well designed teaching coupled with meaningful and appropriately difficult retrieval and practice is better on most axes. When possible… good teaching often needs refinement. And you’d be surprised how many educators know very little about the neuroscience of learning!
- zahlman 9mo ago
  > And you’d be surprised how many educators know very little about the neuroscience of learning! I'm (pleasantly) surprised every time I see evidence of one of them knowing anything about it.
  - raddan 9mo ago
    At the university level in the US, few faculty get any kind of training before they are expected to start teaching. And the teaching requirement is more or less “do no harm.” If you’re at a research university, which includes many publicly funded universities, then your career trajectory is based almost exclusively on your research output. I could go on, but it suffices to say that it’s not surprising that the teaching could be better. That said, most institutions have teacher training resources for faculty. I was fortunate to be able to work intensely with a mentor for a summer, and it improved my teaching dramatically. Still, teaching is hard. Students sometimes know—but often don’t know—what is best for their learning. It’s easy to conflate student satisfaction with teaching effectiveness. The former is definitely an important ingredient, but there’s a lot more to it, and a really effective teacher knows when to employ tools (eg quizzes) that students really do not like. I am frequently amused by the thought that here we have a bunch of people who have paid tons of money, set aside a significant fraction of their time, and nominally want to learn a subject that they signed up for; and yet, they still won’t sit down and actually do the reading unless they are going to be quizzes on it.
d-us-vb 9mo ago
Trial and error is necessary and beneficial, but not after the student becomes frustrated or anxious/bewildered by the complexity. The research shows that striking a balance between teacher intervention and trial and error is the optimal approach. If a teacher notices that a student is way off course but they keep persisting in one branch of the trial-and-error search space, it’ll be best if they intervene and put the student on the right branch. The student can still use the knowledge of what wasn’t working to find the solution on the right branch, but just persisting would be ineffective. Gaining true understanding/insight is necessarily trial and error. Teachers cannot teach insight. But they can present the optimal path to gain insight.

shakna 9mo ago

I'd add nuance to Hermans' work. Its not all experiment blind, but also not feedback-less. They advocate for "direct instruction", not just rote learning. > As that is not a surprise, since research keeps showing that direct instruction—explanation followed by a lot of focused practice—works well. Note the "lot of focused practice". [0] https://www.felienne.com/archives/6150 https://www.felienne.com/archives/6150

raddan 9mo ago
There’s a pretty rich literature around this style of pedagogy going back for decades and it is certainly not a new idea. My preferred formulation is Vygotsky’s “zone of proximal development” [1], which is the set of activities that a student can do with assistance from a teacher but not on their own. Keeping a student in the ZPD is pretty easy in a one-on-one setting, and can be done informally, but it is much harder when teaching a group of students (like a class). The. Latter requires a lot more planning, and often leans on tricks like “scaffolded” assignments that let the more advanced students zoom ahead while still providing support to students with a more rudimentary understanding. Direct instruction sounds similar but in my reading I think the emphasis is more on small, clearly defined tasks. Clarity is always good, but I am not sure that I agree that smallness is. There are times, particularly when students are confused, that little steps are important. But it is also easy for students to lose sight of the goals when they are asked to do countless little steps. I largely tuned out during my elementary school years because class seemed to be entirely about pointless minutiae. By contrast, project work is often highly motivational for students, especially when projects align with student interests. A good project keeps a student directly in their ZPD, because when they need your help, they ask. Lessons that normally need a lot of motivation to keep students interested just arise naturally. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zone_of_proximal_development https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zone_of_proximal_development

robocat 9mo ago

> usually it meant just straight up getting the command wrong 5 times before trying to read the man page, thinking I understood what the man page meant, trying again another 5 times I think that is a developer's superpower. The poncy term for it is grit. I tell others that the secret to leaning computers is frustration and persistence. > and then giving up. Knowing when to stop or change direction is hard. I've definitely wasted years of work failing to solve something that I eventually had to give up on (most memorably depending on nasty Microsoft products). But I've also been paid very nicely because I've solved problems that others struggled with. And I was paid for the failures too.

snowmobile 9mo ago
I consider myself a fairly good developer, and I think that's in large part due to knowing, "doing this should be possible, and the reason it's not working right now is just due to stupidity (my own or the developer of whatever I'm using's)". But yes, in a few (thankfully rare) cases it just plain isn't practically possible. Even then, I've given up on problems just to have it nagging in the back of my mind and then randomly coming up with a beautifully simple solution weeks later. That's sort of the essence of what I like about programming (and math too).
jama211 9mo ago
Grit is something you gain once you already have an intrinsic motivation, such as already having a belief you can do this. Something has to spark in people that they’re capable in the first place.
- godelski 9mo ago
  People forget that struggling is part of the learning process. It's great that people want to make things easier to learn, but struggling is essential. You want to ensure that people don't struggle so much they get stuck (one extreme), but you don't want to make it so easy people don't struggle at all (the other extreme). There's balance, but that balance requires struggling.
  - 9mo ago

inopinatus 9mo ago

I'm trying to remember being a young Unix user but it was four decades ago, so the details become hazy. Nevertheless the proper go-to after the manpage fails to clarify matters is the same as it ever was, that is, one reads the source code, if you have it, and this is easier today than ever.

vacuity 9mo ago

I'd like to add that, while anything will have some learning friction, learning the Unix CLI is rather unnecessarily painful.

raddan 9mo ago
I’m curious: what do you see as unnecessary about the CLI? Or, to put it another way, in what way should the CLI be changed so that the only remaining difficulties are the necessary ones?
- vacuity 9mo ago
  I'm not qualified to give a complete answer, but I think two main issues are the proliferation of flags in standard tools (e.g. ls has a lot of flags for sorting behavior) and the extreme preference for plain text. Text is very useful, but a lot of semantic information gets discarded. Representing structured data is painful, stdin/stdout/stderr are all in one place, window resizing makes a mess sometimes (even "write at end of line" isn't given), and so on. I'm definitely not qualified to describe just how to fix these issues, though.
  - raddan 9mo ago
    I think you hit the nail on the head. Plaintext is universal in a way that nothing else really is. Outputting structured data means that consumers would have to process structured data. That definitely raises the difficulty of the programming. It’s not an easy problem, but I also do not have any good ideas.
trashb 9mo ago
I actually feel like the Unix/Gnu CLI is quite nice (yes I'm used to it already). I feel like it provides a lot of consistency through community standardization and standardization through POSIX and libraries. For example it's quite difficult to find a program that breaks the "-o --option" long/short options and if you do the "man command" or "info command" pages will tell you how to use a program. In my experience this is quite different on for example Windows. Learning it is a step but once you've learned the basics you can read 90% of the commands.

pmontra 9mo ago

Getting a pipeline wrong 5 times is common. The normal process is: write a couple of steps, right output! Add a grep, bad output! Fix it, again, again, right output! Add cut -bM-N, adjust the boundaries a few times. Sort the output. Oops, sort -n