Erik Bray writes:
Nope. I totally get that they don’t know what a shell or command prompt is. THEY. NEED. TO. LEARN.
I don't want to take a position on the proposal, and I agree that we should *strongly* encourage everyone to learn. But "THEY. NEED. TO. LEARN." is not obvious to me. Anecdotally, my students are doing remarkably (to me, as a teacher) complex modeling with graphical interfaces to statistical and simulation packages (SPSS/AMOS, Artisoc, respectively), and collection of large textual databases from SNS with cargo-culted Python programs. For the past twenty years teaching social scientists, these accidental barriers (as Fred Brooks would have called them) have dropped dramatically, to the point where it's possible to do superficially good-looking (= complex) but entirely meaningless :-/ empirical research. (In some ways I think this lowered cost has been horribly detrimental to my work as an educator in applied social science. ;-) The point being that "user-friendly" UI in many fields where (fairly) advanced computing is used is more than keeping up with the perceived needs of most computer users, while the essential (in the sense of Brooks) non-computing modeling difficulties of their jobs remain. By "perceived" I mean I want my students using TeX, but it's hard to force them when all their professors (except me and a couple mathematicians) use Word (speaking of irreproducible results). It's good enough for government work, and that's in fact where many of them end up (and the great majority are either in government or in equivalent corporate bureaucrat positions). Yes, I meant the deprecatory connotations of "perceived", but realistically, I admit that maybe they *don't* *need* the more polished tech that I could teach them.
Hiding it is not a good idea for anyone.
Agreed. Command lines and REPLs teach humility, to me as well as my students. :-) Steve -- Associate Professor Division of Policy and Planning Science http://turnbull/sk.tsukuba.ac.jp/ Faculty of Systems and Information Email: turnbull@sk.tsukuba.ac.jp University of Tsukuba Tel: 029-853-5175 Tennodai 1-1-1, Tsukuba 305-8573 JAPAN