On one hand, I get where he's coming from. You'll get more people interested in something when you give them direct access to all the cool stuff first and none

On one hand, I get where he's coming from. You'll get more people interested in something when you give them direct access to all the cool stuff first and none of the setup. This is how Khan Academy structured their Programming courses. If people don't have immediate roadblocks thrown in their way, they'll want to stick around longer. On the other hand, there is a common mindset in computer science and programming of "I don't understand this, it must be bullshit." This article comes fairly close to fitting this mindset, and may actually exist squarely within those parameters. Ultimately, everything you want to do is going to come with prerequisites. If you want to go out in public, you must first learn to dress yourself. If you want to cook something, you must learn how to properly heat your oven, stove, grill, or whatever. You can't just say "I'm making chicken - the appropriate cookware should already be set up for me and heated to whatever is necessary to make chicken." There are so many different configurations you can use to create software or cook chicken that you can't just say "this is the one setup that will take care of all your chicken-cooking needs." There's always been a strange fear of the command-line interface. Maybe because it looks old we think it's automatically shit. "This is the way people did stuff in the 70s - how have we not improved on this yet?" Just because a method has been around for a long time doesn't automatically mean it's out-dated. In fact, if a method HAS survived that long, it usually means it's got something going for it. Maybe, in the future, someone will come up with software that's better to use to get you started on something new. However, the person who creates that software is going to have to have a fundamental understanding of how those command-line tools actually work. If you want to improve something, you need to understand it and not just dismiss it as "bullshit". And if you're a mentor in the CS field, maybe just complaining and expecting someone ELSE to fix the CS field-specific issues isn't the approach you should be taking.