[larrys]

"just the ability needed to put together a shell pipeline to get a job done, or a twenty-line script to automate some tedious task. Imagine how much that would change everyday life."

Well unfortunately like learning a foreign language if you don't constantly use those skills they are near worthless. Especially as you get older. And in one way it's quite a bit different than learning a foreign language. There is a great deal of latitude to make mistakes in, say, Spanish. If you don't have it even slightly correct people can still piece together what you are saying. With programming as everyone knows it's got to be near 100% accurate in syntax or it's not going to run and/or give correct results. I agree that being able to do things in the shell is helpful if you are somewhat regularly doing that type of work. I question how useful it is if someone learns that in high school or college and then needs to apply it to do a task years down the road.

Edit: In other words it's not like learning how to ride a bike or play tennis.

[SixSigma]

Add into that, when I was at school I learned to code on a Research Machines 380Z in C/PM.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Research_Machines_380Z

Then a ZX81, then a BBC Micro

What would now be utterly useless skills if I was suddenly in need of adding some code to my work years later.

Ten years ago AJAX was just appearing [1], Web 2.0 was the buzz, and the iPhone was 2 years away. What would you teach kids today to equip them for their work in 2025 ?

[1] http://www.quirksmode.org/blog/archives/2005/11/javascript_a...

[mikeash]

Could this be an argument for making computers harder to use by requiring programming for common tasks?