I raised my kids on GUIs and they love it.<p>(I don't disagree that exposing kids to the command line is probably a valuable thing, but the idea that kids who learned to type a magic command to launch games on C64 have more useful knowledge than kids brought up on Mac/Windows is frankly stupid.)<p>Last night my five-year-old daughter complained her iPad was out of battery so I gave her my Nexus 7 and she had no problems using it (except for the relatively poorer quality of the apps). Then I gave her my Kindle Fire and she had no problem using that. (No, she can't read beyond numbers and sounding out words slowly.)<p>It's sad how because my daughter has been brought up on GUIs she can't run a computer from the command-line. No, wait, it isn't.
No matter what you raise your kids on, they'll pretty much love it (for awhile). It's interesting, they can control it. You love what your parents love, for awhile at least.
I've heard of being raised on the bread line, or the poverty line, but the command line? That's real deprivation. Imagine how excited they will be when they learn about hot water and inside toilets.<p>More seriously, what can a 2-5 year old do on the command line that would interest them? I'm genuinely curious.
When I was a kid, my dad knowing I could not read, made for me single-letter .BAT scripts to launch whatever I wanted on the DOS.<p>When a new game was installed, I would go ask him: "how I launch that game where you push boxes? (sokoban)" and he would say: "oh, press D, as in 'Dog'"<p>And that way, he taught me the letters.<p>Later, I then figured that those single letter commands were made by my dad, and I wanted to learn how to make them too!<p>Before I learned how to read or write, I learned CD and DIR...<p>As result eventually, I wanted to learn how to read and write, so I could make my own programs.<p>When I got good enough at making my own programs, my dad introduced me to GWBASIC. I was 6 years old then.<p>I still have a liking for CLI... I am now working on a OSX, it has two terminal windows open.<p>On windows I rarely use shortcuts, I launch everything for the "execute" thing, typing the path of whatever I want. Also when I have network issues I fix them with CMD.<p>When I learned how to use AutoCAD (my dad is civil engineer) I also preferred keyboard over mouse, it was much faster with few exceptions.<p>I think that kids raising on GUIs maybe will lose something, skip learning some interesting things.
I just viewed it as a story of a self-described hacker sharing his love of computers with his kids. And it reminded me of how I first resisted the replacement of the command line with a GUI (Windows ?3.1? - yes, I'm rather "mature") at work because I didn't want to lose that sense of control and flexibility.
adorable, and good for you! Seems kids now, spend all their time on computers, and don't even know how to use them. My parents supported my interest in computers from a young age and it's paid off for me a thousand times over, but that was when I had to learn about jumpers and IRQ's to install a new peripheral. I fear that if they had offered the same "support" these days, I would just be really good at facebook and videogames.
if nothing else, this shows how fantastically malleable children are. this is why we need parents, not advertisers, telling them what they should like, do, and explore.
My big problem with command line (as it is commonly implemented) involves learning curves. If you're using a GUI word processor/text editor and you don't know how to, I dunno, auto-indent, you open the menu bar and browse around until you find something that says "auto-indent". If you're using Vim, you...google for <vim autoindent> and try to find a result that actually answers your question and isn't a barely-related comment or a comprehensive list with your answer buried somewhere on screen 12.<p>Essentially, a GUI allows you to explore the options available to you in a fairly consequence-free manner. Most command lines offer no obvious, intuitive way to do that, and actively punish you for experimenting without being sure of your actions.<p>(Raised on CLI from the age of 7, BTW, and it took me years to accept GUIs. I've come to believe that they both have their place, but a well-designed GUI is clearly superior for casual day-to-day use. CLI is a useful tool, but a specialized one.)
Do other fun things as well.. like say, play prince or blood or lion king. Growing up playing these games along with mspaint and pinball, formatting c drive couple if times made up my childhood.<p>And due to having a computer early in my life, I turned out to be more technically "aware" than most of my peers.<p>Now the important thing for me was having that curiosity. Leave them curious for more. :)
"I Raised My Kids On the Command Line...and They Love It" - no they don't, most kids just want to play with their paint or chat app or some game. OP's kids haven't actually learned anything other than they had to go through some irrelevant ceremony to get to play with their favourite app. You don't make your kids break out ICE's or hardware debug tools just so they can boot the lounge flatscreen so they can watch Postman Pat.<p>I wish people would stop pretending this is educational for children at this age, it's not. All the kids are doing is spending a bit of time with their Dad, who I'm sure they love, to get to the end result which is to play with TuxPaint.
I think its sort of funny 'raising your kids to use computers.'<p>The first computer my family ever got was bought at the request of my older brother (probably around 1998) and they knew NOTHING about it. It was always us kids that were using it and figuring things out on our own - it was a fun time. Of course I was a little older than 3, maybe 6-7.
This. Is. Awesome.<p>Kudos that a dad has the where with all to give his kids an introduction to technology that will increase their understanding and appreciation of current and future tech. This is a lot harder than just handing your kid an ipad - and (hopefully) his kids will thank him for it when they grow up.
I think if kids were introduced to some kind of tiling window manager with CLI, they would easily get use to it and probably prefer it to complex GUIs.<p>The command-line is interactive and that's where its power comes from. I think a mixed approach would be ideal both for kids and professional hackers.
In a different perspective, was wondering if this approach gives any goodness to eyes for the kids since they don't do GUI much. Any thoughts, skypeople (just watched avatar) :)