I want to say I've heard of this guy before, or at least, read of other geek dads introducing their children to less GUI-fied interface while teaching them about computers. I love the concept, but, I have some serious internal conflict when I try to come down on whether I like this idea or not.

Before I go further, yeah, you're totally right. My three year old nephew has zero patience for anything computer-y that isn't an iPad. He carries his sister's vTech laptop by the mouse, dragging it behind him as he runs around, screaming in jealous echolalia of his older sibling. I tried to demonstrate to him that every time you hit a letter, it says a word and displays the word/object on the screen that starts with the letter you press. He proceeded to just bang on the keyboard to see how fast he could get it to switch between responses. He's not much better with the iPad, but he knows damn well that he better treat it nice or Grandpa gets very, very angry. He still gets frustrated with Fruit Ninja occasionally and starts hitting it, but just the occasional slap, nothing like throwing the tablet. (He did figure out the "app deletion" hold-and-hit-the-wiggling-red-X feature of the iOS desktop. My sister came back to all of her apps deleted one day. There's hope yet.)

My 6-year-old niece is a bit of a different story. Her reading comprehension is great, and she's velociraptor-smart when it comes to figuring out UIs, but she doesn't have the patience for some of the things. Kids, however, have the advantage that they'll click on anything, and their memory for "what they want" and "what they don't want" is brutally efficient. She knows not to hit the "buy" buttons when the advertisements come up on the screen, and has memorized all of the cancel and "x" buttons and will hover above where they will appear while the advertisements play. She knows that there's an "Internet" thing that has to be connected for Elf Yourself to work right. She also knows how long it takes her to do certain tasks, or whether certain tasks are "perpetual," and can manipulate her brother into waiting patiently (i.e., forever) while she finishes a drawing or whatever ("The program has to finish, Khalil, you can play after that").

That said, it would be an immense feat for either of the 3 or 6-year-olds I know to take on the command line, particularly when they have tasted of vTech and iOS computers. Despite my love for it (it's like hugging your data!), it's notorious for being unforgiving, counter-intuitive, and limiting for seemingly simple things compared to other GUI devices. It teaches you the absolute full extent of the complexity of some of the services we take for granted, but children don't really have an appreciation for things at that level. For younger kids, or anyone who can't pull at least ~30 WPM, it is a punishing experience until either a) you become a faster or more accurate typist, or b) learn tricks to reduce the number of required keystrokes.

When I was 6 or 7, I knew that I had to type "menu" in order to get to a more graphical menu application my Dad has set up in DOS to let me browse through my games. That was the extent of my command line experience, and I saw it as a hurdle, not as a thing I wanted to learn more about. However, I knew that once I'd booted Command Keen, I had to use the arrow keys and the space bar to jump, and I got really good at the arrow keys and the space bar. This skills applied later to Oregon Trail and Number Munchers, but despite my hours in computer lab hacking Mavis Beacon to show that I'd finished my exercises, what I was really going for was getting at least 10 minutes in playing Dinopark Tycoon. It wasn't until maybe 7th or 8th grade that I got on AIM/MSN/ICQ that I discovered that in order to keep up with IM conversations I had to become a much, much better typist. It wasn't until I wanted to play multiplayer games with my friends that I learned about networking. Web pages? I wanted to have games for my friends on my website. Programming? I wanted a counter to increment every time somebody visited my website.

Much as I'd like to argue that kids would learn more valuable lessons about computing and computer basics by starting on the command line, you have to have an absolute need and an interest for something you're learning, otherwise nothing sticks. The kids that would tolerate a CLI to get basic things done might learn by rote ("I must type 'mailx' if I want to access my email, I must type 'finch' if I want to access my instance messaging client..."), but that wouldn't be helping them learn a whole lot, and certainly wouldn't give them a leg up on their peers who have a list of apps on their tablet that give them access to such things. I certainly wouldn't punish them by forcing them to write an essay without a word processor when the rest of their classmates have one.

As a CLI/programming/automation evangelist, it's hard for me to convince adults, no less children, why computers are infinitely fascinating, and therefore, are worthy of your time and patience and mental real estate. Technology consistently outpaces our understanding of it, which makes my hope of inspiring lifelong interest in young people a hard thing to communicate. Computing of tomorrow will barely resemble my understanding of it, and my excited, wildly gesticulating orations probably already seem dated to the next generation. I can't simply tell my niece and nephew that there's a secret world, in which anything is possible, and is limited only by your imagination and your willingness to learn. They have to discover that for themselves. And they have to be excited about it themselves. And they have to be comfortable, and feel like they aren't being punished.

That said, unless something absolutely requires it, I'll probably never give a child or a relative of mine something that runs Windows. Mac OS, maybe, but Linux would be my first choice. The amount of software available, the open environment, and the sheer potential for learning is too great to pass up. Plus, all the things I've written, or the programming tools I'm familiar with, will be absolutely available, without question or hindrance.

Operating system aside, though: there's no way that my kids would have unrestricted, or at the very least, unobserved access to their computer, or the Internet. They can learn about tunneling, proxying, and spoofing MAC addresses if they want access to something without dad knowing about it. I say this because the Internet is a scary fucking place. I can say this because I grew up there. I would rather them fight tooth and nail to earn their privacy, learning to protect themselves from someone like me. Because that's what they should be doing. That's what everybody should be doing.