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Comment by EdSchouten

3 years ago

I'm not saying that this isn't a great way for people to familiarize themselves with basic Unix shell commands. That said, why would you want to teach this to kids?

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EdSchouten

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throwaway47292  3 years ago

Now with everything on the cloud, kids are growing more and more disconnected with their computers, instead of the kid making the computer do something, they do some magic sequence of actions and sometimes things work, sometimes they dont.

Being able to type a command, give it some input and see its output, I believe is the most fundamental way to interact with the computer.

The basic concepts of files, folders, programs and processes are getting more and more murky with every new iOS and windows release, and yet, those are still the building blocks of everything, they are just hidden by some obscure interfaces and menus or are just plain inaccessible to the user.

UNIX Pipes are the most pure and useful way I know of how the user interacts with the programs and how the programs interact with each other passing their output to the other program's input, and I think it illustrates how more complicated things can be built.