It’s also excellent documentation, written by someone who clearly knows their audience. It keeps all operations in GUI-land, which most users consider more safe. It avoids almost all technical explanations.
Folks responding with “Terminal is easier” are missing context. You’re not the audience. The fact that you can come up with seven solutions for this proves that :)
"Many of these students have not used the command line."
I'd suggest that we are failing to teach students learning to code, the basics of how to use computers. Pre-requisite should be a class on how to use the command line.
The CLI is literally just: You write a command and a thing happens. That isn't a thing that people get hung up on. The main weirdness you need to tell them about is how to select/copy/paste and use the history. Throw in a lesson about how paths work. Sure the commands need to be remembered but for a start you basically just need pwd, cd and python/python3.
You are not doing your students a service if you try to teach them programming by shielding them from anything that could give them a feel for the systems they develope for.
That said, I do resent people who claim CLIs are harder because of that. What works for one person may not work for another.
I think we massively underestimate what people are able to do – if motivated. Making sure they are motivated is our task. The CLI is awesome and not just for full on nerds.
When I shown the CLI I make sure to switch white on dark text to dsrk on white text. First it is more readable that way on a projector, second people are less likely to switch their brains off. A bit like xkcds idea to make graphs look hand drawn to reach people better.
Somw of them might know more about files than they wish they would, e.g. the group whom I showed how to manually read broadcast wav file using a hex editor. Of course as an example to figure out where the actual data of an audio recording goes and what role metadata plays.
"statistics arguably is not a branch of mathematics. It is a mathematical science, built upon the mathematical discipline of probability. Some ways in which mathematics and Statistics differ include: Statistics often does not produce definitive conclusions whereas mathematics usually does."
LLM's give you what you want to hear.
Now get some live quotes, both for and against, from actual working mathematicians.
There are a lot of definitive conclusions about lines | planes | surfaces that "best fit", by many metrics, sampled data, etc.
anyway, on reflection, the word "is" does not fit here.. statistics and mathematics are not disjoint, but no, statistics is not a field of mathematics.. ask around among people with serious graduate studies in mathematics and they will fill you in.. Maybe it overlaps into the academic practice and their department structure too.
They are plugged into the backend of many search engines these days and they excel at picking out the nature of the pattern | result that a questioner wants and feeding back what they want to hear.
> ask around among people with serious graduate studies in mathematics and they will fill you in
I checked in with Terence Tao who I first met at an Australian math club get together in the mid 1980s .. he pointed out his 2007 paper on The Dantzig selector (a novel statistical estimator for linear regression) and seems fine accepting statistics as part of mathematics.
I'd hate to cite myself given my rather dull work, but I feel that Terrence surely qualifies as someone "with serious graduate studies in mathematics" given his Fields Medal and UCLA professorship and all that jazz.
Do you have someone more qualified in mind?
Emmanuel Candes, Terence Tao "The Dantzig selector: Statistical estimation when p is much larger than n," The Annals of Statistics, Ann. Statist. 35(6), 2313-2351, (December 2007)But I feel all this discussion has gone off topic that was the teaching of statistics in our post- (post-?) modern era.
$\tau as \epsilon$!
A little knowledge is often dangerous. Sometimes it makes one look like a fool.
Which is unfortunately exactly what enables so many tech support scams, so I'm not sure it's a pattern worth reinforcing.
In addition to that, while it might still be helpful for completely non-technical users, I really don't think "avoiding the terminal and edits to files" is a desirable goal for anyone studying either Python or data analytics.
Most people learn computers because they want to get better at a task, like programming. The point of this post is to help people get unstuck so they can begin learning at all. Adding more gates in front isn’t going to help.
Beyond the attention seeking 'tips of the day' kind of popups in random places and stages that derails you all the time (I mean: ALL the time) but at least so tiny little fragments of wisdom that you reamin the same clueless, well inside the error of measurement in cluelesness. Only good for putting The Product into the focus (Am I nice, eh? What a cool feature I have, eh?! Brilliant am I, eh?!) instead of the need of the users.