Sunday, February 24, 2013

teaching the padwans

We have some smart but newb-ish interns at work; their experience with computers has been a lot different than mine because of the the 20-odd years between us.

Still, when one of them remarks "Oh yeah, the command line; I was thinking I should learn how to use that." it gives one pause (This was from a guy who had done some neat work in Eclipse already, and had shown good potential.)

I mean, how would you describe a command line to someone who had grown up with mouse-and-windows interfaces all their life? Without making too many assumptions about what they know? The line I came up with was:

"Well, it's kind of like a chat program, except you're texting with a REALLY dumb robot."

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