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I Raised My Kids On the Command Line and They Love It (2012)
- zwieback 13y agoThis kind of article makes me gag - the online equivalent of those "proud parent of a ..." bumper sticker.
- kozhevnikov 13y agoIf articles on the internet make you gag, please don't forget to drink lots of water, you'll be dehydrated by lunch time. A father is trying to be the best father he can be within his own world-view. Gasp! Someone call child protective services!
- JonFish85 13y agoNo matter what you raise your kids on, they'll pretty much love it (for awhile). It's interesting, they can control it. You love what your parents love, for awhile at least.
- victoriap 13y agoYes, children love to play with their parents, at least till adolescence until it is not anymore cool for them.
- rxaxm 13y agoif nothing else, this shows how fantastically malleable children are. this is why we need parents, not advertisers, telling them what they should like, do, and explore.
- test1235 13y agoI don't think anyone should be telling them what to like ...
- jboynyc 13y agoPrevious discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4141993 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4141993
- jacob019 13y agoadorable, and good for you! Seems kids now, spend all their time on computers, and don't even know how to use them. My parents supported my interest in computers from a young age and it's paid off for me a thousand times over, but that was when I had to learn about jumpers and IRQ's to install a new peripheral. I fear that if they had offered the same "support" these days, I would just be really good at facebook and videogames.
- gavinlynch 13y agoI disagree. I think you're taking a narrow-scope on this story. The lesson here is that you can teach kids about any facet of the computing landscape, and they can catch on quickly and learn a valuable skill. Just because you're not getting into low-level hardware interrupts or vector tables or memory addresses, does not mean you "don't know how to use" a computer. I'm glad you have that knowledge, I enjoy stuff like that too. But a lot of kids are "really good at facebook" and use that as inspiration to get into web dev. They want to create the next social network, or the next cool website. Maybe it sparks their interest in big data, or databases, or the math behind social networks. This is just one example. I don't particularly care about or use facebook personally. But there are a million different facets to computing. Maybe they end up as a graphic designer for a video game. Maybe they learn they enjoy the machines themselves and build one some day. Maybe they learn they don't quite care about computers, and just learn to become literate in an essential tool of the Information Economy. That's good too. shrugs
- jacob019 13y agoI see your point, and it's valid. I'm just really grateful to have had an interest in computers at a time where proficient use has required a deeper understanding. I take my car for granted, it's a machine that just works, I need not understand the complexities of an automatic transmission to enjoy it's maximum benefit, and I have no desire to. I appreciate the complexities of the computer, and the knowledge has been a huge benefit to me. I would want my kids to have the same appreciation, but the conditions that have fostered it have changed. I think it's cool that the author is giving his kids a ground up introduction to computers, and I think it will help them.
- _sabe_ 13y agoI'm gonna teach my future kids how to use a word processor, then they will know something no one else does.
- adestefan 13y agoI'm going to make sure they only use Word Perfect 5.1 without the help of the F-key stickers.
- _sabe_ 13y agoI was not trying to be sarcastic. If I manage to teach them how a word processor is supposed to be used, then and only then can we go over to the shell.
- jeffasinger 13y agoThe shell is more fun than a word processor. Very few kids are going to be as motivated to learn how to produce complicated documents as are going to want to learn how to make their computer obey their every wish.
- Tloewald 13y agoI raised my kids on GUIs and they love it. (I don't disagree that exposing kids to the command line is probably a valuable thing, but the idea that kids who learned to type a magic command to launch games on C64 have more useful knowledge than kids brought up on Mac/Windows is frankly stupid.) Last night my five-year-old daughter complained her iPad was out of battery so I gave her my Nexus 7 and she had no problems using it (except for the relatively poorer quality of the apps). Then I gave her my Kindle Fire and she had no problem using that. (No, she can't read beyond numbers and sounding out words slowly.) It's sad how because my daughter has been brought up on GUIs she can't run a computer from the command-line. No, wait, it isn't.
- brodney 13y ago>the idea that kids who learned to type a magic command to launch games on C64 have more useful knowledge than kids brought up on Mac/Windows is frankly stupid. >children that used Commodores or TRS-80s or DOS knew a lot more about how their computers worked, on average, than those of the same age that use Windows or MacOS He said they know more about how their computer works, not that they have more useful knowledge. Would you disagree?
- adestefan 13y agoI would. How does typing in the program name instead of clicking on a button teach you more about how a computer works? Maybe the kid might get more interested in computers, but it won't be from using the command line to run a program. In the end the kid just wanted to play with tuxpaint.
- fps 13y agoI would disagree. The command line is really no more about "how their computer works" than a GUI is. They're both interfaces to run programs. In each you can navigate to a location on a filesystem (which is, itself, an abstraction on top of how the computer is really working) and run programs. Perhaps people who don't understand computers think that the command line is really how computers work, and that interacting with the command line inherently makes them more knowledgeable, but that's completely wrong. You understand no more by parroting apt-get install than you do by double clicking on a .deb icon.
- JetSetWilly 13y agoI've heard of being raised on the bread line, or the poverty line, but the command line? That's real deprivation. Imagine how excited they will be when they learn about hot water and inside toilets. More seriously, what can a 2-5 year old do on the command line that would interest them? I'm genuinely curious.
- byroot 13y agoAs much seriously, how a 2-5 year old can use the command line beyond mimicking what dad shown ? I mean if you can't read nor write how can you __learn__ command line ?
- bluedino 13y agoMost 3 year olds can write their name (at some degree) and recognize quite a few words.
- JonnieCache 13y agoWhen you're 5 everything novel in your environment is basically like magic. So being as the command line pretty much is the closest thing we have to actual magic spells anyway, it's going to be useful for them to encounter this fact early on, while they still find it easy to accept.
- inkandstick 13y agoWell I was raised on DOS around that age and there were plenty of Sesame Street[1] style DOS games I could launch. I don't know that I could do much more, at that age you kind of run on autopilot with remembering the exact method to do something. [1]: http://muppet.wikia.com/wiki/Ernie's_Big_Splash http://muppet.wikia.com/wiki/Ernie's_Big_Splash
- RougeFemme 13y agoI just viewed it as a story of a self-described hacker sharing his love of computers with his kids. And it reminded me of how I first resisted the replacement of the command line with a GUI (Windows ?3.1? - yes, I'm rather "mature") at work because I didn't want to lose that sense of control and flexibility.
- vadivlkumar 13y agoIn a different perspective, was wondering if this approach gives any goodness to eyes for the kids since they don't do GUI much. Any thoughts, skypeople (just watched avatar) :)
- mumbi 13y agoThis guy totally stole my idea. Awesome story.
- gprasanth 13y agoDo other fun things as well.. like say, play prince or blood or lion king. Growing up playing these games along with mspaint and pinball, formatting c drive couple if times made up my childhood. And due to having a computer early in my life, I turned out to be more technically "aware" than most of my peers. Now the important thing for me was having that curiosity. Leave them curious for more. :)
- speeder 13y agoWhen I was a kid, my dad knowing I could not read, made for me single-letter .BAT scripts to launch whatever I wanted on the DOS. When a new game was installed, I would go ask him: "how I launch that game where you push boxes? (sokoban)" and he would say: "oh, press D, as in 'Dog'" And that way, he taught me the letters. Later, I then figured that those single letter commands were made by my dad, and I wanted to learn how to make them too! Before I learned how to read or write, I learned CD and DIR... As result eventually, I wanted to learn how to read and write, so I could make my own programs. When I got good enough at making my own programs, my dad introduced me to GWBASIC. I was 6 years old then. I still have a liking for CLI... I am now working on a OSX, it has two terminal windows open. On windows I rarely use shortcuts, I launch everything for the "execute" thing, typing the path of whatever I want. Also when I have network issues I fix them with CMD. When I learned how to use AutoCAD (my dad is civil engineer) I also preferred keyboard over mouse, it was much faster with few exceptions. I think that kids raising on GUIs maybe will lose something, skip learning some interesting things.
- jseip 13y agoThis. Is. Awesome. Kudos that a dad has the where with all to give his kids an introduction to technology that will increase their understanding and appreciation of current and future tech. This is a lot harder than just handing your kid an ipad - and (hopefully) his kids will thank him for it when they grow up.
- a0 13y agoI think if kids were introduced to some kind of tiling window manager with CLI, they would easily get use to it and probably prefer it to complex GUIs. The command-line is interactive and that's where its power comes from. I think a mixed approach would be ideal both for kids and professional hackers.
- teh_klev 13y ago"I Raised My Kids On the Command Line...and They Love It" - no they don't, most kids just want to play with their paint or chat app or some game. OP's kids haven't actually learned anything other than they had to go through some irrelevant ceremony to get to play with their favourite app. You don't make your kids break out ICE's or hardware debug tools just so they can boot the lounge flatscreen so they can watch Postman Pat. I wish people would stop pretending this is educational for children at this age, it's not. All the kids are doing is spending a bit of time with their Dad, who I'm sure they love, to get to the end result which is to play with TuxPaint.
- randyrand 13y agoI think its sort of funny 'raising your kids to use computers.' The first computer my family ever got was bought at the request of my older brother (probably around 1998) and they knew NOTHING about it. It was always us kids that were using it and figuring things out on our own - it was a fun time. Of course I was a little older than 3, maybe 6-7.
- PhasmaFelis 13y agoMy big problem with command line (as it is commonly implemented) involves learning curves. If you're using a GUI word processor/text editor and you don't know how to, I dunno, auto-indent, you open the menu bar and browse around until you find something that says "auto-indent". If you're using Vim, you...google for <vim autoindent> and try to find a result that actually answers your question and isn't a barely-related comment or a comprehensive list with your answer buried somewhere on screen 12. Essentially, a GUI allows you to explore the options available to you in a fairly consequence-free manner. Most command lines offer no obvious, intuitive way to do that, and actively punish you for experimenting without being sure of your actions. (Raised on CLI from the age of 7, BTW, and it took me years to accept GUIs. I've come to believe that they both have their place, but a well-designed GUI is clearly superior for casual day-to-day use. CLI is a useful tool, but a specialized one.)