[napmo]

But why?

There are more important things out there to teach to a 7 year old kid. Later, the kid can learn much faster, more important commands than simple 'ls' stuff.

Life skills, math, sports and stuff like that are much more important and fun, compared to these simple commands.

[klodolph]

If you always prioritize learning the "important" stuff, it's gonna suck the joy out of your life and your kid's life.

Kids learn by imitating. If they see you learning the terminal, they ask you how to use it. The right thing to do is to show them.

[IE6]

This basically explains how I began. My parents had DOS and Windows 3.11 machines and I wanted to get at the games. Eventually the games became boring and I explored the OS and other programs. This eventually turned into an IT career (after a decade or so of additional unimportant stuff).

[asdff]

Because being able to use a computer to general purpose compute is helpful all over life. It's not a separate skill, its a tool. If you like math and sports you can use code to quickly run analytics on arbitrary data. Maybe you win the march madness bracket among your friends this year as a result or you start tracking interesting info on your personal skills. Maybe you can use some custom software to help you speed through a homework assignment in school, or you can opt to make some software and sell it on the side instead of flipping burgers for part time work while in school. Maybe you like cooking, now with programming you can write a scraper to collect recipes from these js heavy websites and store them into a local database not prone to bit rot. All people should be budgeting, and knowing how to code means you can easily roll your own budgeting software without having to deal with fees or the lack of features tailored to your own purposes from big commercial software. If you decide to run a small business, now you can handle your own web development, you can rope in services to run a storefront or track business analytics. maybe you are into gardening, now you can program a raspberry pi to water your plants for you whenever the soil starts to dry out or the weather calls for a lack of rain or some hot weather in the future.

programming is a tool that you can apply to just about every facet of life and output any number of posibilities. Not having learned it earlier is my biggest regret. imo knowing how to program and really understand how a computer works should be seen as the reading and writing of our modern age. computer literacy is low in this world and that's dangerous, but i think the reason for this is people just don't often get exposed to programming unless they want to seek it out themselves. it's rare to have parents who know how to code or even schools that offer classes in coding, much less require it like english.

[ivanche]

Every time someone asks me why, I reply with why not? I simply saw that he was interested in somewhat strange appearance on a screen and that led to our "learning" (fun, really) session.

Of course I'm aware that math, soft skills etc. are probably going to be more important to him than `bash`, and I try to show him a bit of those too! But that doesn't mean that showing him something unusual when there's already an interest from his side is useless.

[fragmede]

I know! I'm so glad I didn't learn anything unimportant as a kid. My brain would have become all full up and it'd be too full to learn the important things later on.