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Comment by Tloewald | Hacker News Reader

The natural progression using the command line is to figure out how to avoid using the command line.

The natural progression of forcing people to use the command line is to turn them off using computers.

Now, the author is presumably a tech geek and the kids probably have some genetic predisposition to doing the kinds of things dad does, so I don't care to predict the outcome. Similarly, the dad may be a great and inspiring tutor. But my view is you wait and see what kids are naturally interested in and try to widen and deepen the paths they pick of their own accord.

It's quite possible that knowledge of vim and emacs and package management won't be the world's most valuable skills in ten years. Whaddya think?

> the command line is at least one layer lower of an abstraction than a GUI

Only if that's the way the system is architected. Maybe thinking that way is actually a handicap.

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I disagree with you regarding avoiding using the command line. I enjoy working in terminal and to the extent possible do as much as I can in there. I also try to understand what is happening "behind the scenes" when working in a GUI.

The way I look at a GUI is that it is built entirely on terminal functions. I see you disagree, but I don't know how a GUI could be created without being built on something at a lower level. Something has to cause it to work, somewhere between bits and hardware, and the screen. Double click to open file? Same as `open file`. Find and replace in a text editor? Same as sed or `s//`.

A GUI can make it easier to do those things, but not always. For example I find using git in a GUI to be a worse experience than it's command line counterpart. I'm more at home with `git diff` than whatever built in attempt at improvement is available. I'd rather edit and resolve conflicts in vim than a visual editor (even XCode which is a pretty nice diff tool).

In short I just don't see myself ever moving off of terminal, and I would never see knowledge of it as a handicap. On the contrary, I'm always looking to learn how to do something new and powerful in it.

> I don't know how a GUI could be created without being built on something at a lower level

Which simply makes my point that being CLI-centric has limited your imagination. In fact the original Mac had a UI built directly on top of the system libraries. On startup it displayed an icon and played a chime (which was its hardware self-test result). Insofar as there was a "CLI" it ran UNDER the GUI. (There is something lower level going on that the GUI, but it's not a terminal.)

Even on a primitive command line machine, there's stuff going on below the level of the command line. In Linux you're running a shell, which is actually not part of the kernel. The fact that the kernel can spew text onto the screen during startup is merely an artifact of what's easy to do using the computer's BIOS or equivalent thereof.

> It's quite possible that knowledge of vim and emacs and package management won't be the world's most valuable skills in ten years. Whaddya think?

Replace your hyperbole of "world's most valuable skills" with just "valuable skills", and I think knowing how to use a text editor and a package manager will still be valuable skills in 10 years. The last 20 years of inertia serve as evidence for me.

> Only if that's the way the system is architected. Maybe thinking that way is actually a handicap.

That is the way all (afaik) computer systems are currently architected. Having a correct model of the world isn't a handicap.

Kowing how to use a text editor !== emacs / vim

Hyperbole aside, I'm happy to remove "most" and let my sarcasm stand.

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