Watching my children’s first experiences with the unix shell is reinforcing my belief that we need something a lot more forgiving for learners, at the very least with reliable undo.
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@mhoye as much as it pains me, the unix shell ain't the best environment to learn to program in
honestly it might be easier with some other programming experience but even then yeah
syntax errors abound
it's one of the things i noted from teaching scratch, so many roadblocks removed to just getting things working
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@tef it’s arguably the worst. There’s no way to build a mental model incrementally, it’s just a wall of disjoint syntax.
@mhoye
nice. i grew up on dos, so only learned cd and dir as kid.
for a file system level undo, you could sneak some git add and commit stuff into the shell prompt function; and then alias "undo" to go one back, like "git reset --hard HEAD@{1}" or whatever.
or it could have a save-game like interface. a git interface for kids could be a thing. i remember saves being helpful as a kid playing wolfenstein 3d and commander keen.
but of course there will still be no way to undo commands like "sendmail".
@mhoye I'd been using VAX/VMS DCL for a few years before I encountered a unix shell. My thought at the time was that it was designed by twenty different people, scattered around the globe, who did not know each other very well, some of whom may have been inebriated.
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@stacey_campbell my only disagreement is that your number is too small and your fraction is also
@mhoye oh. oh, yeah…
I feel like someone could do that fairly quickly. LVM has snapshots and copy-on-write overlays that one could use to make restore points at least…
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@c0dec0dec0de Sir you are why-don’t-you-justing somebody who has been using Linux since it came on one floppy disk, and saying “you could do this with an LVM checkpoint” to someone asking for a novice-accessible undo.
If this was happening in a professional context I’d be chewing a leather strap and screaming internally but … well, this is where I started too so….
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@mhoye I was thinking about this as I set up and got into deep customizing my debain machine. There should be some easy setup that gives you a test computer. Undo functionality at a deep level, obviously at the expense of performance. Let ‘em break it and rewind. Then they can save their configs off and go to the “real” environment
@mhoye As someone who's never been fully comfortable with unix, I'm really scared to ask you how old your kids are, in case you say 5 years old. 🙂