[paulryanrogers]

But it's a step hill to climb for new users. My first year of CS involved an intricate shell assignment and took a considerable time investment. Ultimately I also leveraged a lot of Bash (one, feature-rich tool) for large parts.

The days of dropping kids in front of a text prompt and expecting them to figure it out are over.

[lapinot]

I don't think bash is feature rich: you have to call a program to do arithmetic! It's BASIC with pipes. If you really want to script in a unix-traditional way you should go for perl i guess. Also: i didn't want to imply going text-mode, scripting probably is going to be keyboard-driven but you may have graphical composition too. Tiling window managers usually get this "graphical shell" right by letting you choose/replace most components (status bar, window decorations, keybindings, launcher-menu, notification viewer). And about learning curve: i think we should really acknowledge that with any tool either you go fast or you go far. I'm not sure what's so unusual about struggling with a programming assignment in first year when for most other things of life it usually takes something from a couple years to a decade to be considered "good enough to stop learning" (or maybe start advanced training) (writing, basic math, music, sport, craft).

[eecsninja]

Maybe if we got them started earlier than college CS, it would be easier.

I learned how to use the MSDOS prompt growing up as a teenager. Most of my programming was done in an IDE, though -- including the first few years of my career. I had also worked a little bit with Linux command line, so I wasn't completely unfamiliar.

At age 26, I joined FAANG and was forced to adapt to developing in Linux 100% of the time. The transition wasn't difficult. I felt comfortable with the Linux command line after a few months, with some help from coworkers and Stack Overflow searches when necessary.