It's true that the "command line" takes a surprisingly long to learn. I've definitely surpassed the 10,000 hour mark, and I'm STILL learning things. (People s

It's true that the "command line" takes a surprisingly long to learn. I've definitely surpassed the 10,000 hour mark, and I'm STILL learning things. (People say that about Vim alone :) ) That's probably because it all superficially looks the same (sequences of characters), but there's are a lot of depth and functionality with many different concepts -- e.g. compilers (cross-compilers too), data compression, networking, storage and file systems, hardware devices, crypto, parallelism, data formats for every problem domain, several important little languages, several syntaxes for the same language (regexes, etc.). But I think you basically have to learn it to become computer literate, and all computer science researchers should be computer literate. Otherwise you can't "fend for yourself". If you are relying on your professor to set shit up for you, that's just lame and you will not be useful in many other contexts. What's the alternative? I think it's "mouse bullshittery", which is even worse. For example, compiling software stuff on Unix can be hard. But I used to use Windows, and it's 10x harder. I remember the last experience I really had with Windows was installing Visual Studio to compile Python, and I hit some trivial but showstopping but in the CDs, and gave up in disgust. The workaround was to copy some DLL somewhere in your \system32 folder, and I'm like "really?" I don't really use Macs for development either, because it's annoying to set up compilers. (It's 10x less annoying than Windows, but 10x more annoying than Linux).