[zygomega]

I wish 'programming' included teaching our kids how to be proficient users of technology. How to effectively google, how to bring up a terminal, ssh to another machine, how to secure your privacy are the type of skills I hope are included in this definition. The architectural and process engineering aspects of programming are better left to learn in adulthood.

[wingerlang]

> How to effectively google

Sounds good

> how to bring up a terminal, ssh to another machine

Uhh, even as a developer I barely ever feel I need to do this (and frankly, I do this quite often).

Being able to ssh into another machine is extremely low on the list of things to learn before being proficient.

[ploxiln]

maybe. but text mode is pretty fundamental really. It could be powershell or anything I guess, as long as it had files and commands and was both interactive and scriptable

[wingerlang]

From your perspective maybe. My whole family use computers daily, some do it at work as well I guess and I would bet the number of times they have needed to go into a shell would be exactly zero.

I doubt they even know about terminals to be honest. Simply not needed.

[burfog]

It doesn't seem needed because you aren't used to what you can do with it. If you were good at it, you'd be horrified at the thought of not having that capability.

It's not just about launching programs and moving files around one by one.

A decent shell, like bash, is fully programmable. It lets you express yourself in ways that no GUI does, possibly excepting LabView or Scratch.

[wingerlang]

I just don't think most people will ever in their lives need to script their computers to batch rename files and automate tasks. Even if they do need it for something it seems more time efficient to find some GUI app to do it, or get help from someone who already know how to do it (a power user).

I also think that even if this was taught from the beginning - it'd remain a power user thing.

But I agree, I use automation/scripting/bash every day and would be horrified to loose this ability. But I also know other developer who doesn't use it at all.

[Morgawr]

>I just don't think most people will ever in their lives need to script their computers to batch rename files and automate tasks. Even if they do need it for something it seems more time efficient to find some GUI app to do it, or get help from someone who already know how to do it (a power user).

I agree with you but you couldn't have chosen a worse example. Mass renaming, tagging or formatting of files is one of the most performed operations of an everyday user and is a massive time sink for people who don't know how to programmatically do it.

Classification of downloaded music or movies is very common. Same goes for moving files around and renaming folders and mass-moving documents. I remember when I had to re-format around 1000 images for a friend of mine because he wanted a different size + format to create some photo album. Just a couple of imagemagick lines vs him and I manually spending a lot of hours doing it painstakingly picture by picture.

[imtringued]

I guess we could try to ruin hacker movies by explaining what a terminal in reality is.

[gruez]

>how to secure your privacy

Do you think kids still care about privacy? As in, the giving all your life details to google kind, not the public Facebook profile kind.