this post was submitted on 19 May 2024
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[–] theredknight@lemmy.world 4 points 7 months ago (2 children)

I have a theory that the crowd of people who learned computers or iPads etc from GUIs only, they have a harder time with terminal. Those who used DOS a lot find it to be a happy space.

[–] possiblylinux127@lemmy.zip 3 points 7 months ago (1 children)
[–] theredknight@lemmy.world 1 points 7 months ago

I'm not saying they can't overcome it or that it is universal. It's just a theory I have based on early observations.

Now, it does make sense that a GUI only person would have to play catch up compared to a person the same age who has a decade of exposure to using a terminal if they're going to code in a terminal. It's just different mindsets and workflows.

At my work the younger coders who say they prefer GUI coding (and are terminal avoidant) seem to have more trouble and their debugging methods have many more steps and take longer. Many times they run everything in Jupyter notebooks and avoid running the processes in terminal at all. This is a problem if they put off end to end testing until the very last moment instead of testing incrementally.

Also, for context, this is to create production level Python code which is to be deployed on a terminal only server.

I'd want to make a measurable experiment with a larger sample size to confirm this theory though, as the systems are complex enough there are many possible reasons for these patterns. I'm just very aware these days of that moment of hesitance, like a deer in headlights, when some people have to open the terminal to solve their problem.

[–] merthyr1831@lemmy.world 2 points 7 months ago

I don't think it's a theory rather than an objective fact. A lot of "traditional" computer skills have almost totally gone extinct because consumer devices are designed to hide as many system features from you as possible.

The saving grace is that even being raised without it, you end up needing these skills to become a developer of any decent calibre. That gives at least some route for these skills to transfer to new generations.