I use terminals a lot. I don't really think about this much, it's just something I do. Recently some of my fellow teachers in the ICT department asked me to teach them some basics of terminal commands on the grounds that using a command line interface is "more professional."* This surprises me because in the US, a lot of people regard a terminal as the most terrifying thing ever. Along the same lines as how some people will respond to comments about simple arithmetic with bold (and proud?) declarations of how they will not/cannot do math, some people respond to terminals with proud declarations that they could never ever do that.
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The horrifyingly horrible root of all terror. |
Tanzanians don't do that. Probably because there isn't a lot of social capital to be gained by speaking of one's computer ignorance. What's with that in the US, anyway? At any rate, it's fun for me, of all the things my coworkers could ask me to do for them, showing them some basic 'cd' and 'mkdir' is high on the list of things that make me happy. Making the world a better place through command lines, yo. Also, I can make my students do simple things via the terminal and they don't know it's supposed to be hard so they just do it. Being Tanzanian students they memorize the commands without actually understanding them, but it's a start.
*For certain values of professional, I suppose.
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