[JackDanger]

Having read the article I half-agree with the author. Yes, learning arcane and inconsistent APIs is not the work the students signed up for and studying command-line tools doesn't materially help them in the near-term. However, the things that make the command-line so difficult also make it easy to package tools together underneath simpler apis. I suspect the students are struggling with having to use tools that aren't supported by their department or industry community. Otherwise they'd have a shared script that they all maintain that turns a bare PC/Mac/*nix box into one that's capable of doing great work.

This happens with every single engineering team. Those who understand the tools wrap them up into something solid so new folks have a great experience on their first day.

[lallysingh]

And hopefully it makes the students less likely to half-ass the build and command line steps in the apps that they write later.