It seems that year over year, computers constantly get easier to use, and it becomes easier for people to start learning to program who have never touched it before. This comes with the consequence that increasingly more new programmers have disturbingly little (and increasingly less) understanding of how computers work, generally.

We're now long past the point where new programmers can be reliably expected to be familiar with the command line, concepts like a "current working directory", etc. Indeed, some of them don't even seem to have a solid understanding of the computer's filesystem (never mind drive letters or reserved characters or the text encoding of paths etc. - I mean that they don't even seem to grasp the concept of files being contained in directories that form a tree.)

For one specific example, there are well-known examples of beginning Python programmers expecting to use command-line commands within the code (12.5 years old and 1.2 million views, BTW), or vice-versa (sort of; it happens much more often when trying to treat the script as executable without setting that up properly, but there are certainly exceptional cases). Python is especially susceptible to this confusion because it's currently the default choice for new programmers and because there's a command-line REPL.

Would a question about the "trying to use Pip in the REPL" issue be on topic here?

More broadly, where's the line between this site and Power Users, when it comes to fixing these elementary issues (where a new programmer needs a proper understanding of how the computer works before it's possible to start programming)?

posted 6 months ago

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Karl Knechtel‭

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