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Welcome to Software Development on Codidact!

Will you help us build our independent community of developers helping developers? We're small and trying to grow. We welcome questions about all aspects of software development, from design to code to QA and more. Got questions? Got answers? Got code you'd like someone to review? Please join us.

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Meta Should beginner-oriented Q&A here include basic use of a terminal (command line) for developers?

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...

3 answers  ·  posted 6mo ago by Karl Knechtel‭  ·  last activity 6mo ago by matthewsnyder‭

#1: Initial revision by user avatar Karl Knechtel‭ · 2024-06-24T18:06:24Z (6 months ago)
Should beginner-oriented Q&A here include basic use of a terminal (command line) for developers?
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](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/8548030) (12.5 years old and 1.2 million views, BTW), or [vice-versa](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/22275350) (sort of; it happens much more often when [trying to treat the script as executable without setting that up properly](https://software.codidact.com/posts/291736), but [there are certainly exceptional cases](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/37311877)). 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)?