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Comment by forrestbrazeal | Hacker News Reader

A neighbor of mine, a professor at an excellent private college who teaches a stats class where the students are required to do a bit of programming, told me the other day that she's noticed a cycle in her students over the past few years.

15 years ago the students tended to come in knowing more about navigating their computers than she did; now, and especially in the last 4-5 years, she's increasingly having to teach them basic computer literacy in order to get to the learning they're actually supposed to be doing.

This has contributed to my resolve not to let my son have an iPad, but he can have a laptop pretty much when he wants one.

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I had a friend tell me recently that he had to teach a (high school) intern how to navigate the Windows taskbar and use the Control-C and Control-V shortcuts on the keyboard. I thought he was joking until he mentioned that the student mostly used mobile devices at home and school and rarely used a PC. Apparently schools nowadays are replacing their laptop fleets with iPads and all that.

Back in the day you would learn this stuff from an actual, printed manual. Proper documentation was a major part of what you got when buying a retail software product, even when bundled with OEM hardware. Where's the user's manual for modern OS's? Even the inbuilt "help" documentation has disappeared.

Prompted by your post I went looking for some, typing 'help' into the start menu search in Windows 11. An app came up called Get Help.

It opens with an ad banner at the top: "Increase productivity and collaboration all while staying organized, using a new meeting solution designed for small businesses. Learn More". Out of morbid curiosity I chose to Learn More but "We are sorry, the page you requested cannot be found."

There are several features in Get Help beyond the primary feature of linking to a broken URL. You can sign in, you can rate your experience out of five, or you can send feedback. There is no Contents or Index, but there is a search box with a few suggested searches like 'How to install Office'. I tried searching 'how to copy paste' (without quotes) but "Your search did not match any solutions." It suggested I sign in to contact support. Closing the app is a little tricky because the minimise/maximise/close buttons are the wrong colour - white on pale grey.

Before closing the app, I selected a rating of 1/5, although my rating had been cleared upon reopening.

> Prompted by your post I went looking for some, typing 'help' into the start menu search in Windows 11. An app came up called Get Help.

I just tried F1 in both Firefox and JetBrains Rider. Nothing. I wonder when that one disappeared. Though at least both have a proper online help.

edit: Trying it in all open apps, some kind of help opens in MS Teams, Discord, Outlook and Directory Opus (file manager).

The empty bloatedness of a stinking, rotten cadaver. And countless vultures fighting over the last pieces. Or trying to sell them.

I would struggle to write a satire of the situation worse than the reality.

In case things change, for future readers, here's a screenshot: https://i.imgur.com/aToMCtE.png

This sounds a lot like my experience with the Help menus in Adobe stuff, I haven’t been able to get to my expensive art tool’s menus from within it for years. I miss when it came in a box with a printed brick of a manual.

I haven't purchased a supposedly user-friendly mobile device in a long time but I don't really recall them having an initial tutorial or something along those lines. You just go through the setup and they toss you at the home screen. In contrast I think the old Androids (when smartphones were just coming out) had a tutorial teaching you how to swipe, pinch zoom, and so on. The assumption is that people know how to use this stuff "intuitively".

The big legacy software suites still have actual help pages and PDF manuals, while the mainstream stuff just has a FAQ on their web page.

MBA: "Tech writers are a cost center. Cut them and we get a fat bonus"

Documentation is sooo oldfashioned. Instant action for satisfaction!

I'm currently in the process of buying various old Commodore hardware (C64, A500, A1200) and investing in better tooling (just got an Oscilloscope) for this reason.

My oldest son (8) and daughter (6) are both interested and at an age where I can introduce them to electronics and computing. When I was my son's age I was already building simple radio receivers (crystal + transistor) so they're old enough to start with these machines.

Laptops will just get used for web games and youtube anyhow.

Did you consider teaching them using something where the learning is more collaborative, where you are not an expert? Scratch, Roblox, etcetera.

Part of the joy of learning the home computer was the feeling of being on the leading edge.

+1, thanks for this anecdote. I'm thinking of coding the world's wittiest oldschool text-only adventure game for our son to make him more comfortable with keyboard input and the command line.

It'll probably also be good for developing creative use of written language (he likes paper books) -- hopes I who learned English and touch typing via Al Lowe's "Leisure Suit Larry" series.

That aside, I'm fine with him playing Minecraft, though. It's a nice fit between uber-realistic contemporary games and 80s computation; also, the Minecraft kids need to use their brain while playing, ha.

Maybe I'm wrong, but it feels like "lousy", rasterized graphics may be better for the child's imagination. It's more close to reading a book where you still have to "draw" the world and characters in your head. But, also, I'm old, and fine with that.

Can't pull the kids out of 21th century, but it makes a lot of sense to introduce them to the most valuable accomplishments of 1980s or 1990s. It's a bit like showing them the simplicity of manual carpentry, chisels and hand planes in the age of electrical tools.

Minecraft is teaching kids a lot about computers, especially if they get the chance to use the more hackable Java version. It's not usually as low level as we got to in the 80s, but there are exceptions to that too (I don't know exactly how old the guy who built a pipelined RISC processor in redstone is, but I suspect they're at least 15 years younger than me).

I've worked with engineering students in a programming class, they do seem to have lots of trouble with things like zipping files, finding things in the filesystem, finding things in drop-down menus, and installing programs. The overall computer literacy levels are definitely lower than I might have assumed...

On the other hand, when I was an undergrad classmates would struggle with many of the same things (although the widespread use of pip has enhanced new users' ability to screw up their computers at scale and give me headaches). And we've all got a funny story about the guy who messed up the group project's share folder, right? Whether it lived on a floppy disk, thumbdrive, or in the cloud.

I dunno. The specifics change, but human creativity when it comes to making mistakes is timeless.

It's bad.

As in, not everyone coming in understands the concept of the right-click.

Maybe that just means that programming tools need to evolve to meet the expectations of the post-home-computer generations.

I'm not sure it's a good idea to require future generations to do things the way we did, e.g. by using a laptop rather than an iPad. I'm not a parent as you are, but I am an uncle. When I was a child, my favorite uncle was a home computer hobbyist, and he taught me a lot of what he knew about programming, particularly in Applesoft BASIC on the Apple II family. When I first became an uncle, I was looking forward to doing for the next generation what my uncle did for me. But the relationship between him and me was a special thing that will not happen again. He started using home computers as an adult hobbyist at around the same time I was born, and my parents probably bought our Apple IIGS based at least in part on his recommendation. Now, there's a wide gap between the way I'm used to using computers and the way that the kids are using them. I think my nieces and nephew, if they have any interest at all in programming, will be better off learning it from someone other than me. And of course, there are so many online resources these days; they don't have to have an in-person teacher for this at all.

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